Artistic Occupation, Fabra i Coats — F.A.A.C.C.C. Festival of Community Arts of Catalonia (2023)

As part of the Festival of Community Arts of Catalonia (F.A.A.C.C.C.), Cuerpos en Escucha activated a four-day performative occupation within Fabra i Coats – Fàbrica de Creació.

The project brought together a group of participants to inhabit the institution as a temporary site of collective life and artistic production. Over the course of four days, the group established a shared working structure centered on textile practices and embroidery, while simultaneously constructing a form of affective governance based on self-defined rules, shared responsibility, and collective negotiation.

The occupation functioned as both an artistic and relational framework. Institutional logics were not rejected but engaged from within, generating friction between established norms and emergent, non-hierarchical forms of organization. The project extended beyond the visible participants, reconfiguring relations with those who sustain the institution’s daily functioning, including maintenance and night staff, whose presence is often rendered invisible.

Through continuous inhabitation, the spatial order of the building was displaced. Production spaces, offices, and circulation areas were reappropriated and redefined through use, transforming the former textile factory—now a cultural production center—into a temporary, lived environment structured by collective rhythms, care, and co-presence.

The work operated as a situated experiment in how artistic practice can generate forms of living, working, and relating otherwise—where the boundaries between production, domesticity, and community are actively reconfigured.