JINHA

NEWS CENTER – As women develop projects of autonomous self-government, Madrid’s Eskalera Karakola provides a nearly 20-year-old example of what can happen when women come together to govern themselves.

Eskalera Karakola is a squat in Madrid, Spain held by feminists. The group works on autogestion principles. Eskalera Karakola organizes activities focusing on domestic violence and women's precarity in post-industrial capitalism. We talked to Eskalera Karakola about their nearly 20 years of struggle and their collective feminist projects.

* Eskalera Karakola is nearly 20 years old. Can you explain how women came together for this project originally? Can you speak about the circumstances and condition in which you felt the need to take this action?

Most of the original squatters are no longer involved in the current activities (although they still support the project).

Anyway, the aim was to provide an occupied space run by and for women, to provide a home for rethinking feminism, from new perspectives and questioning its Eurocentrism. Also it was a space rooted in the neighborhood, a very alive one and in constant changes.

* What kinds of difficulties have you dealt with in the history of Eskalera Karakola?

After 9 years of life in the old squat, fighting to defend our right to continue in the neighborhood, the local council offered to rent us two buildings to be run and maintained by ourselves. These buildings are located in the blocks of the original old building. To begin with, these spaces were completely derelict (no water, electricity, walls, floor) so we had to start from scratch. Also, in this new space we dreamed of setting up a radio studio. We decided to do all the renovations ourselves. Despite being a slow and expensive, it was a truly passionate and motivating experience. We fixed up the first building as a work and meeting space and the radio studio. The second building was designed more for public activities and workshops but due to lack of time, forces and funding, we were only able to complete basic renovations. Both buildings were adapted to be accessible to people with diverse needs—not for legal reasons, rather so that the Eskalera Karakola, as a public, political (and also intimate) space, is used daily by diverse organizations.

Now, nearly10 years later, the local council is demanding that improvements in the second building are made to meet legal regulations if we are to continue using it as a public space. This means more renovations including soundproofing so as not to disturb the nearby neighbors.

* Can you tell us about your current projects? What are the current women involved, and what are they involved in? What are your current goals?

Today, La Eskalera Karakola is a plural, historical transfeminist place open to the neighborhood.

The collectives that are working currently at the space are:

BAH de verde
Cooperative group (Bajo el Asfalto está la huerta). We are a self-sufficient cooperative group. We produce vegetables in rented lands in Perales de Tajuña that we distribute and consume ourselves. One Sunday every month, we make an agroecological lunch, which is called "V-Vermut". Our aim with this activity is to raise awareness about our own project, agroecology and other ecologically friendly ways of consumption. It also allows us to raise funds for the cooperative’s expenses.

En Lucha
We are an organization of revolutionary people, feminists and anticapitalists who fight for a different world, a world without oppression, state or private property. To do this we come together, create and fight in different social movements: feminist, ecologist, trade unions, LGBTIQ, animal liberation, students, etc. We believe that to achieve social, ecological and gender justice, reforms are not enough; a grassroots social revolution is essential. Those who are in power and privilege today won’t let it go easily. We edit a newspaper, a debate magazine, flyers and books. We also organize different public activities to spread our ideas.

Espacio Viernes (Friday Space)
Espacio Viernes (Friday Space) was created to generate common ground within feminism through different artistic and cultural expression, in the form of a multiformat laboratory. It will be a place where different workshops will take place, which attempt to encourage reflection, play and the political implication of those involved to promote a world of more horizontal relationships, through caring for and respecting others.

Karakoleka
Karakoleka is a self-run food cooperative. We meet in the Karakola on Tuesday evenings to try and consume in a fairer, more local, healthier, tastier and cheaper way. To do that we make our lives a little bit more complicated, although once you get the hang of it it’s easy. We remedy the little difficulties with beer. Sometimes it seems chaotic but it’s a chaos that works.

Migrantxs Trasngresorxs (Transgressive Migrants)
We are a collective of diverse migrants with different sexual and gender identities (neocolonized, precarious, transfeminist and intercultural) who transit between geographies and bodily, emotional and symbolic territories to deconstruct and construct spaces from which political and sociocultural representations are proposed that vindicate transgressive actions. Our actions are framed within participation in activist and academic spaces. We form part of the transfeminist movement and the activities that are organized from it. As a collective we drive the campaign “I decide my own name” so that trans people can decide their name on their I.D.

Pandi Trans
We are a collective of people who self-identify as trans*, brought together by the need to feel supported within our own community, and during the situations that we face. We are our own chosen trans family, which is one of self-care, accompaniment and self-managed. We come from different realities, places and activisms. We go through different bodily and geopolitical frontiers. One of our aims is to pass and break through those barriers imposed by the heteropatriarchal structures and the establishment power, which limit, restrict and incapacitate our daily wellbeing.

Sangre Fucsia
Sangre Fucsia (Fuchsia Blood) is the loud zine of Ágora Sol Radio, broadcast from Eskalera Karakola. Each Friday we take the effervescence of Madrid (and the world) and transform it into sounds, noises, words. We celebrate feminist culture, edge art, subversive poetry and music made by women and transformative activism. To make radio is a visceral desire, as strong and intense as blood. It is a dying fuchsia, that goes beyond and encompasses violet, red-black, pink and rainbow colors.

Surco a Surco Karakola
We are an agroecological production and consumption cooperative, working since 2002. We are actually formed by eight food consumption groups, which are located in different neighborhoods in Madrid. We have our own vegetable patch and we consume the vegetables that we produce there. The agroecological approach is more than eating ecological vegetables: it’s about taking care for the health of the land, creating jobs in rural areas that should not be precarious, reducing the energy required to produce and to transport our food. We think it is both possible and necessary to do this in our actual society. We believe in sustainability through good use and in an agricultural model that is not involved in accelerating its times or manipulating its capacities with harmful chemicals.

Territorio doméstico
We are a group of mainly immigrant women employed as domestic workers and we provide a space for mutual support and struggle for our rights as workers. We consider ourselves a cross-border collective, being formed by women from different parts of the world. In this sense we are the central figures in the global chain of care work and therefore our politics emerges from ourselves, from our experience and knowledge. For this reason our slogan is "without us, the world doesn't move" and our logo is the image of a woman with a cogwheel.

Transfeminist self-defense
We are a self-run group of women, dykes and trans* who use the Ekka for training in feminist self-defense techniques. Self-defense is an important means of individual and collective empowerment, which strengthens our solidarity and self-awareness. We use transfeminist self-defense to challenge the stereotyped female role of passive victims and the myth that men are stronger than women. We raise our consciousness that fear, defenselessness and weakness are social constructs and therefore we have the power to transform this fear into anger and strength, allowing us to respond to different types of aggression.

Feminist reading and debate groups in English and French
We have two heterogeneous groups of women, dykes and trans* who meet once a month to debate a given text from a feminist perspective. The debates as well as the text are in English and French. We use these languages in order to be up to date both with texts which haven't been translated into Castilian and contemporary debates. We also want to create a forum for people who prefer to use English or French or would like to practice it. The groups are open and no long-term commitment is needed, so if you're interested, come and give it a try!

* In the Rojava part of Kurdistan, women have been leading an ongoing revolution. Women have built autonomous women's centers that assist women experiencing male violence, in addition to autonomous women's units in all areas of life. Do you have any thoughts on this effort to create a women-led revolution?

We don´t have a common, collective approach to that. But lot of us are paying a lot of attention to the events at Kurdistan, specially the autonomous feminist struggle.

(gd/cm)