Dancing with Counterpreservation

The Tabacalera is a 30,000 sq m building located in Madrid city centre. Erected at the end of the eighteenth century, it originally functioned as a state-run tobacco factory until its closure in 2000. After ten years of abandonment, the Ministry of Culture leased part of the property to a series of local collectives to use as a “self-managed social centre”. Here, in an atmosphere characterised by repurposed decay and new informal accretions, all kinds of cultural and communal activities are held every day, including those of the Centro Revolucionario de Arqueología Social (CRAS, Revolutionary Centre for Social Archaeology). Between 2018 and 2020, I engaged with the social and organisational dynamics of the centre, exploring the motivations and aspirations of its various collectives and of other actors involved. Deploying Daniela Sandler’s notion of “counterpreservation” – the purposeful embracing of decay as a social and aesthetic act – this article suggests that, in just a decade, the centre has become an icon of free culture and libertarianism, acquiring a consistent heritage identity that is indissociable from its decaying materiality. This article also aims to examine how both social and aesthetic dimensions forge a joint resistance to potential institutional plans that may jeopardise the centre’s continuity.