La Escalera Karakola is a
women’s occupied house in a multiethnic working class neighborhood in the
center of Madrid. For six years,
la Karakola has served as a convergeance point and a point of departure for
feminist thought and political action both in the neighborhood and in the
far-flung feminist networks in which we participate. An open and changing collective of women -- mostly young,
some not so young, of various sexualities, nationalities, class and educational
backgrounds -- maintain the house as a public space for women, and from this
space we generate projects which extend beyond the house itself.
The Karakola has housed projects
investigating the urban experience of migrant women, the transformations of
work, questions of representation and sexuality, discussions about the feminist grounding for antimilitarist
interventions. We have introduced
the workshop ‘Tools against Racism’ into local social movements,
encouraging ourselves to constantly investigate our own discourses. We have initiated an ongoing campaign
against violence against women which insists upon looking at the many and
complex ways in which ‘violence’ and ‘security’ are
constructed. We participate in a
neighborhood network proposing socially inclusive urbanistic alternatives to
the ‘rehabilitation’ currently under way.
These and hundreds of other
investigations, mobilizations, discussions and publications have arisen from
the crucible that is the Karakola.
We insist that all these apparently diverse concerns are intimately related,
and we attempt to trace the lines of their relationship, articulating them
within the feminist and the global resistance movements, refusing to separate
the academic from the activist, the local struggle from the global context.
Attention! Under Construction:
Working to recuperate a feminist social center.
Presently, la Karakola finds
itself in an urgent situation. We have written a major proposal to rehabilitate
the house we occupy, a 17th century bakery which is structurally in very bad
condition after decades of abandonment.
In a neighborhood marked by brutal real-estate speculation and a
desperate lack of public spaces, the Karakola serves an irreplaceable function
as an autonomous, self-managed, feminist public space, and we hope through this
rehabilitation to secure its continued existance and augment its
possibilities. But is an uphill
battle, requiring that the city acquire the building, guarantee the cession of
its use to the assembly of the Karakola in recognition of our social project,
and make a major investment in restoring it. Thus our proposal represents a political, legal and financial
struggle in which we need all the help and support we can get. Please contact us!
to contact us:
www.sindominio.net/karakola
karakola@sindominio.net
c/Embajadores
40, 28012 Madrid, Spain