The Foundation

The Fundación de los Comunes (the Commons Foundation) is a statewide network of collectives that spans different cultural areas and comprises culturally and politically driven groups working for a process of social democratisation.

Throughout the Spanish State, the FdlC has operational hubs in Iruña/Navarra, Barcelona, Terrassa, Zaragoza, Madrid y Málaga. The social centres at these geographical points—Katakrak, Ateneu Candela, la Casa Invisible y Traficantes de Sueños—are also home and incubator for different research groups—OMB, La Hidra, A Zofra, OMM and Ulex—and also where our self education programmes take place within the framework denominated Nociones Comunes.

The genetic makeup of our foundational bodies is defined through the concepts of self-management, horizontal decision making, the socialisation of material and immaterial resources and support for the common, i.e., opening our spaces to the social good and providing universal access to what we produce through Creative Commons licenses. In short, democracy and free culture.

Material support for this machinery is a core issue as we can only aspire to achieving our ends by ensuring increasingly greater stability and consistency for our productive enterprise. Our vocation is to generate affective communities and political alliances; we must have a base of sustainable livelihood for those of us who are engaged in this challenge—forging work and political commitment into a way of life.

Each configuration procures self-funding through different productive activities such as bookselling and publishing. The Foundation, on its part, strives to attain resources for the whole through collaborative agreements with other institutions, submission of projects to European and statewide competitions and application for funding from private legal entities. We also have alliances whose generous and regular donations are fundamental for our sustenance.

This entire complex structure exists in order to wholeheartedly contribute to a social transformation, one able to democratise—politically and economically—how we organise the common. Our contribution to social transformation adopts a productive model, creating new paradigms for interpreting reality that come about through research, analysis, discourse and spaces for self education.