La Casa Invisible

La Casa Invisible (Invisible House) is a social and cultural centre of citizen collective management that was born in March 2007 when a wide network of citizen collectives, neighbours and creators decided to fill with life a beautiful municipally owned building that was in a state of abandonment.

With the creation of La Casa Invisible, the citizens and creators wanted to manifest their opposition towards how the city government was leaving out its inhabitants in the extreme gentrification process taking place since the turn of the millennium, feeding mainly the construction business and tourist industry.

The objectives of the organization were clear:
- to stimulate processes of social self-organization that strengthen social networks and movements that work for social justice;
- create a cultural experimentation laboratory led by local creators and based on the criteria of cooperation, collaborative production and free culture;
- promote training paths in different fields (social sciences, environment and ecology, politics, technology, art and cultural creation among others) that foster critical thinking, citizen empowerment, social creativity and collective action;
- to experiment with models of citizen and collective management of facilities and common goods that promote a democratic radicalization based on equity and the direct participation of neighbours and citizens in the design, development and management of public policies.

For its situated and committed work over the years, La Casa Invisible has earned its place as an example and a model for top-level art institutions, both nationally and internationally, to learn from, support and follow, on how to engage differently with and listen better to its public/community, locality and site.

This has been demonstrated repeatedly through different collaborations with MNCARS (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia), other museums and universities. Lately, La Casa Invisible has received the public and explicit support of CIMAM (Annual Conference, 2022) and currently, the commitment of Van Abbemuseum and L’Internationale that are supporting the project.

The management model is based on ‘the commons’ with operating groups and assemblies and is relatively simple: commissions/work areas (Communication, Activities, Strategy, Economy and Rehabilitation) and a fortnightly General Assembly where the commissions and participants in the project management exchange information, they coordinate, debate and make decisions about the course of the project. The management areas have been and are spaces open to participation and their operation is democratic. Besides the collaborative management of the basic functioning of the building, in La Casa Invisible numerous autonomous, collective and individual projects have opened up different fields of political/social/cultural/artistic experimentation.