habitat

Calafou is in itself a network of bodies united through social relations based on collaborations and trust. These have been developed in different spaces, initiatives and groups based on autonomous and bottom up dynamics such as squatted social centers and DIY initiatives going on in Barcelona and other cities around the world. Some of these individuals, with their own subjectivities and particular social graphs have converged in Calafou in order to fortify their search for experimentation, autonomy and freedom.

Calafou has gathered together a group of people already engaged for many years with the commons and more concretely with transgender practices, free technology development and with informal learning and research processes. All the persons presenting this proposal are contributing to established initiatives, self- managed and designed by the people for the people. There is a deep interest for exploring our degree of autonomy and how we can expand self-management dynamics by transferring and creating new data, information and knowledge that can be either situationist, theoretical, experimental and/or performative.
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We do not have experience in rehabilitation of long-abandoned industrial colonies in a sustainable manner, and we are learning by doing. Consequently our bodies and minds are being greatly influenced by the tasks, social relations and praxis we are building. There is a need to develop devices and artifacts that interact with our bodies and with the ecosystem around us in order to provide us with data, information and in the last instance, a better understanding of the levels of stress, happiness, tiredness, pollution, intoxication, interactions, exchanges, anger and hunger that we are going through. Besides, we are facing the challenge of transforming a space that has not been designed for the comfort of the people living and working there, but, on the contrary, was intended to control them and insure they would be productive and reproductive. Many aspects of the architectural design symbolize epic failures consistent with old paradigms and as we experience these in body and mind, we also plan to overcome them by finding new ways of inhabiting the space and making it accessible and usable, both by ourselves and by the many visitors to the colony.

How can we develop resilient infrastructure for all and do it through processes that do not harm but positively impact the whole ecosystem?; How are we engaging with those experimental processes in order to generate useful artifacts, devices and social processes?; How do we create exchange from different social, cultural, political and sexual perspectives to achieve more inclusive autonomy, freedom and useful knowledge?

For instance, since its inception two years ago, Calafou has hosted the following events focused on autonomy: an encounter on self-management practices, a gathering of people who research alternative energies and efficient engine development, a hackmeeting of people interested in political and social application of free technologies, a workshop to build rocket heaters and more recently a Hack the earth meeting. Next august we will develop a second meeting of alternative energies and engine development that will focus in working further on the following prototypes (led lighting, irrigation with arduino, stirling and fluidin, hydrogen generator and biodiesel) currently in development. One of our ultimate goals is to be inventors, makers and distributors of knowledge and artifacts that empower by providing low impact, easily accessible, inclusive resources that cover varying necessities and desires.