Free Culture and the City: Hackers, Commoners, and Neighbors in Madrid, 1997–2017

285 Pages·2023·10.034 MB·English

by  Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Adolfo Estalella

FREE CULTURE
AND THE CITY
A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress . cornell . edu.
FREE CULTURE
AND THE CITY
Hackers, Commoners, and Neighbors
in Madrid, 1997–2017
Alberto Corsín Jiménez
and Adolfo Estalella
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2023 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage
House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at
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First published 2023 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Jiménez, Alberto Corsín, author. | Estalella, Adolfo, author.
Title: Free culture and the city : hackers, commoners, and neighbors in Madrid,
1997–2017 / Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella.
Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2023. |
Series: Expertise : cultures and technologies of knowledge | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022012868 (print) | LCCN 2022012869 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501767173 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501767180 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501767197 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501767203 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Social movements—Spain—Madrid—History—21st century. |
Protest movements—Spain—Madrid—History—21st century. | Political
participation—Spain—Madrid—History—21st century. | City and town
life—Spain—Madrid—History—21st century. | Hacktivism—Spain—
Madrid—History. | Madrid (Spain)—Social conditions—21st century.
Classification: LCC HN583.5 .J56 2023 (print) | LCC HN583.5 (ebook) |
DDC 303.48/40946410905—dc23/eng/20220822
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012868
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022012869
Cover photograph: Raquel Congosto (left) and Isabel Arenas (right) of Lagaleri-
ademagdalena art collective at a Copyleft urban art exhibition organized by the
collective, Madrid, 2012. Photo: Luis Daza.
Contents
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: F ree Culture and the City 1
Part 1. THE CULTURES OF THE FREE CITY 19
1. Free Neighborhoods 23
2. The Copyleft and the (Copy) Right to the City 42
3. The City in Flames 63
Part 2. CLIMATES OF METHODS 83
4. More Than Many and Less Than One 91
5. Freedom in 3D 113
Part 3. M ATTERS OF SENSE 133
6. Assembling Neighbors 137
7. Ambulations 157
Part 4. BRICOLAGES OF APPRENTICESHIPS 173
8. Auto- Construction Redux 181
Conclusion: Notes on Intransitive Urbanism 203
Notes 211
Bibliography 241
Index 257

Preface
The fieldwork on which this book is based began in 2010. Our proj ect started
when Alberto relocated from the University of Manchester to the Spanish Na-
tional Research Council in 2009 and was awarded funds to carry out ethno-
graphic research at Medialab Prado, a digital arts center hosted by the Department
of Culture at Madrid’s municipality. Shortly a fter, Adolfo joined the proj ect as
coresearcher. The proj ect was meant to be a study of the culture of a citizen
hacklab, an investigation inspired by the anthropology of organ izations and
social studies of science. Two months into our fieldwork, however, we became
distracted. The Tobacco Factory (La Tabacalera), an abandoned industrial fac-
tory at the heart of the city, was occupied by squatters. The occupation was
hailed as an epochal moment in the history of squatting in Madrid. What took
us by surprise, however, was that every one at the Medialab seemed to be involved
in the occupation. In Madrid, as in Rome, you do as they do, so we followed suit.
At La Tabacalera our attention was drawn for the first time to the specificity
of cultura libre, free culture, as an urban sensibility. Although at the Medialab
we had come to take for granted the center’s endorsement of f ree culture princi-
ples as part of its technical and design philosophy, we were surprised to find the
same princi ples invoked by squatters when speaking of a “copyleft social and self-
managed space.” So it was that we found out about the history of the free cul-
ture movement in Madrid and the long history of intimate associations between
hackers, squatters, neighborhood activists, and museum curators. The situated
nature of cultura libre as urban consciousness and habitus, weaving and imbri-
cating itself across spaces, collectives, and dispositions in the city, slowly began
getting under our skins, too.
It took us almost a de cade to sense our way through and weave a story out of
the many stories and trajectories entangling our paths. The result is, in some re-
spects, an exercise in writing ethnography as a m atter of sense, to invoke one of
the book’s central concepts: an exercise in wayfinding and storytelling— through
journeys and détournements, histories and assemblies, archives and footwork,
biographies and infrastructures— the huffs and the puffs, the frictions and the
frissons, of learning together.
Long before we had a proj ect, however, we had a time- traveler. At the turn of the
century, Adolfo worked as a trainee journalist in the newsroom of Spain’s lead-
ing daily newspaper, El País. There he became one of the country’s first reporters
vii
viii PrEfACE
on all matters digital. He took an interest in the development of vari ous cultura
libre initiatives, including the organ ization of the first Dorkbot workshops in
Spain and the mobilizations against the introduction of the digital canon
(both described in chapter 2). Th ese and other accomplishments merited his
appointment as one of a handful of editors of the f ree software and technology
news website Barrapunto. Although in time Adolfo would leave the field of
journalism for the excitement of anthropology, his time travels to those early pi-
oneering days have proved an invaluable source of insight and connections for
writing this book.
Our fieldwork proper began at Medialab Prado, where, between February 2010
and February 2011, Adolfo regularly attended meetings, participated in design
workshops, and joined members of staff in trips to pre sent the work of the me-
dia lab at other cultural organ izations or events. For his part, Alberto similarly
attended design workshops and laboratories, and between 2015 and 2018 he was
a permanent member of the lab’s task force on social innovation. At the squat-
ted social center of La Tabacalera, Adolfo joined vari ous teams from the earliest
days of the occupation in March 2010, and he remained involved for over a year,
attending assemblies, helping clean, build, and repair the space, organ izing
events, and so forth.
Our work with the 15M movement and popu lar assemblies began with the
occupation of the square at Puerta del Sol on May 15, 2011, and lasted well into
2012. In the early days of the movement, both of us regularly attended meetings
at assemblies in the neighborhoods of Lavapiés and Prosperidad and the Puerta
del Sol General Assembly. Once the main encampment at Puerta del Sol was dis-
mantled and the movement took root for good in the barrios, Adolfo joined the
facilitating task force in charge of organ izing the weekly gatherings of the La-
vapiés assembly and contributed to the workings of the assembly in that capac-
ity for just under two years. Either jointly or individually, we attended hundreds
of assemblies, preparatory meetings, working groups, demonstrations, and di-
rect actions.
As we made preparations to start writing this book, we turned to some of our
friends and interlocutors for in- depth interviews. Over the course of four years
we carried out over sixty interviews with hackers, curators, guerrilla architects,
cultural mediators, journalists, squatters, neighborhood activists, artists, civil
servants, historians, and participants at assemblies, to name but a few. Unless
other wise stated, all translations from Spanish sources, including academic texts,
interviews, archival materials, and ethnographic exchanges, are our own. Except
when spoken by an interviewee, we w ill not be providing sources for colloquial
phrases or terms in common use in conversational contexts.
PrEfACE ix
In January 2012 we teamed up with two guerrilla architectural collectives, Ba-
surama and Zuloark, in a funded research proj ect on the material architectures of
the assembly movement. We met weekly for six months, visited vacant lots and
occupations, participated in auto- construction workshops, built a dome, or ga-
nized seminars, and wrote papers together. What began as a formal collaboration
developed over time into a friendship and a shared problematization about the
mutual designs of complicities and complexities for our runaway world. This is
an insight we have come to trea sure: how complicities alloy complexities and how
complexities ally with complicities, in the city, in anthropology, and beyond.
This book is the culmination of many such alliances, comradeships, and
amalgamations. We have respected our friends’ and interlocutors’ decision to
have their real names used in the text, u nless other wise stated. This is in keep-
ing with the f ree culture philosophy that intellectual work is always choral and
embodied, and we have tried to capture some of t hese expressions of relational
and dynamic thinking in the text itself.
We would like to thank Juan Carrete and Marcos García for making our field-
work at Medialab Prado pos si ble. Our gratitude toward Marcos, as the pages of
the book testify, extends in endless directions. To this day, the Medialab remains
a second home for us, thanks in no small mea sure to the boundless hospitality
of Mónica Cachafeiro, Sonia Díez Thale, Patricia Domínguez Larrondo, Laura
Fernández, Raúl González, Javier Laporta, Gabriel Lucas, José Miguel Medrano,
and Daniel Pietrosemoli. Jara Rocha embodied like no other the joy of proto-
typing as a means for delirious conspirations.
It is a hopeless task to keep a tally of all the people who over the years have
enriched, thickened, and textured our understanding of cultura libre as an urban
sensibility. Carla Boserman, Nerea Calvillo, Jordi Claramonte, Gloria Durán,
Montfrague Fernández, Amador Fernández Savater, Ana Franco, Juan Freire,
César García, Igor Gónzalez, Bernardo Gutiérrez, Patricia Horrillo, Rocío Lara,
Tíscar Lara, Carmen Lozano Bright, Jaume Nualart, Mar Núñez, Juan Martín
de Prada, Ignacio Priego, David Rodríguez, Lorena Ruiz, Olivier Schulbaum,
José Luis de Vicente, and Carlos Vidania have all, at one point or another, over
beer, conversations, interviews, or discussions, helped us entangle, disentangle,
and re- enchant our story further.
The history of libertarian municipalism in Madrid, like the history of most
social movements, risks fading into yet another history about the accomplish-
ments of big men. We trea sure the time we have spent with some of the protago-
nists, who have reminded us that the vicissitudes of history work in other ways. We
are grateful to Carlos Alberdi, Rubén Caravaca, Jesús Carrillo, Javier de la Cueva,
Jesús González Barahona, Pedro Jiménez, Azucena Klett, Margarita Padilla, José