Where we find feminism matters; from whom we find feminism matters.

LaSal, edicions de les dones (1979-1990), was the first feminist publishing house in the Spanish State. It originated from the laSal library-bar in Barcelona, founded a year earlier. From its inception, it was a multilayered space for feminist artistic practice, culture, community, and action. It became a model for the development of self-managed feminist infrastructure for the expression of feminist art, literature, thought, solidarity, and politics during Spain's Transition to democracy.

Leaning on my field notes, this essay draws on an exploration of the unindexed archives of two key LaSal members during the spring of 2024: artist and co-founder Mari Chordà (Amposta, Tarragona, 1942) and editor and translator Mireia Bofill (Santiago de Chile, 1944), housed in the archive at the self-managed feminist space of Ca la Dona in Barcelona. Mari Chordà, a pivotal though under-recognised figure in feminist art in Spain, used her artistic practice—visual, literary, and performative—as both militant and creative expression of feminist resistance. Her work is integral to the development of laSal’s history. Mireia Bofill, as an editor and translator, shaped LaSal’s intellectual contributions, particularly in the dissemination of feminist theory and literature. Bofill’s infrastructural work was foundational to LaSal’s ability to function as a space for feminist cultural production.

At a time when state institutions belatedly acknowledge feminist histories within museum collections, Ca la Dona offers a radically different model of feminist memory work—one that does not rely on the museum’s extractive, taxonomic logic but instead embraces collectivity, informality, and care-based forms of preservation. If the museum classifies and immobilises, Ca la Dona weaves and holds. Unlike institutional archives, which often aestheticise feminist struggles while severing them from their infrastructures of care, Ca la Dona embodies a living feminist practice: its archiva does not merely store history but continuously generates and activates it. In contrast to the museum’s logic of patrimonialisation, which seeks to fix feminist legacies within state-sanctioned narratives, Ca la Dona demonstrates an alternative infrastructure—one that resists capture, thrives on participation, and sustains feminist worlds beyond the limits of institutional recognition.

Mixing personal experience—the process of making friends with spaces, objects, memories, and people—and letting the archive speak, I argue that LaSal’s legacies, which can be felt at Ca la Dona, demonstrate how emancipatory feminist infrastructure has emerged through intergenerational, self-organised, healing practices of preservation that deploy intimacy and relationship-building as their methods, constituting alternative forms of feminist heritage, which I call matronomies. These practices, which challenge traditional notions of heritage (patrimonio in Spanish) based on the accumulation of wealth and the passing down of objects, also resonate with the concept of affidamento or entrustment as practiced by Italian feminists in the 1970s. As such, they constitute intimate, care-based forms of preservation that challenge the museum’s biased, taxonomic canons. On the other hand, the suffix “-nomy” (from the Greek nomos, meaning law or governance) implies the governance of feminist legacies through shared responsibility, non-linearity, and intergenerational solidarity, acknowledging the interconnectedness of feminist histories.

This archiva (FemArt/Ca la Dona, 2024), understood here as an archiva de sentimientos —following queer scholar Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of archives of feelings— is a situated, living body with a material and emotional relationship to traumatic political history, which is woven through archival and artistic practice. It is relational, collective, and vulnerable. The very choice of the term archiva, rather than archivo, signals a deliberate departure from institutional archival logic, aligning instead with feminist and queer modes of preservation that emphasise care, affect, and embodiment. The archiva is not merely a repository but a dynamic space of exchange, always open to new additions, interactions, and creative reinterpretations. It actively resists the historical amnesia and erasure imposed by official historiography, legal frameworks, and state-sanctioned, museum memory practices that continue to aestheticise and deactivate feminist cultural production.

The archiva gathers feminist heritage through the intimate practice of acuerpar (to hold close within a body) which thrives on collectivity, informality, entrustment (affidamento) and intimacy.² Contrary to the museum archive, the archiva does not merely hold or store memories —las acuerpa (it holds them up dearly close to its body). Acuerpar is an intimate act, where the archive not only preserves but holds memories and stories, which come to life with the care and presence of the community involved in its preservation and activation.

Through its community, affect-based preservation practices, Ca la Dona’s archiva bears witness to the rejection of the institutional, material, and ideological boundaries of the patriarchy, holding up an alter-institutional body of memory that feels fundamentally uncomfortable with the infrastructures of the museum. For their part, the intimate, affective knowledge production practices and infrastructures of laSal, whose echoes reverberate in the practices of Ca la Dona at present, challenge the museum's role as tastemaker and guardian of objects, pointing at its stifling, exclusionary practices —particularly in shaping Spain’s democratic self-image.

Note: The following diary fragments, written during my research at Ca la Dona, are italicised throughout this text to distinguish them from analytical sections.

Centre de Documentació, Ca la Dona

C/Ripoll, 8, Barcelona

8 April 2024

I don’t know how I ended up knowing that I needed to come to Ca la Dona. At first, I didn’t really know where I was landing. I had initially planned on a weeklong visit as part of my research stay in Barcelona and disembarked here on the first Monday of March 2024 to do my fieldwork. As I have stated in countless funding applications in the last years, my initial aim was to conduct PhD fieldwork on laSal, one of three case studies in a genealogy of self-managed feminist knowledge-making in the post-dictatorial Spanish State. I am interested in the ways in which womxn* got together, since the advent of democracy, to create infrastructures of all sorts to support intellectual, affective, and bodily emancipation: in other words, to make space where there is none.

Ca la Dona is a self-managed feminist space. From the outside, it looks like a semi-closed public building on a narrow street in central Barcelona —open only in the afternoons, and only if you ring the buzzer. Mireia Bofill, the former editor and translator of laSal who, at the age of 83, is also a fundamental figure at Ca la Dona —"our grandmother," as described by archivists Laura Casellas and Rebecca Schmitz in conversation³— portrayed the space in a 1999 essay as "a referent of the feminist movement in Barcelona”.⁴ However, after a month of being here and relating to others inside and outside the archive, I have consistently had the feeling that Ca la Dona is simultaneously visible and invisible to the city and its inhabitants. I can’t help but draw a parallel between this impression and the perpetual limbo state of feminist cultural legacies across the Spanish State: simultaneously inside and outside of official narratives in art history and art historiography, this condition is amply reflected in museum archives and collections where feminist artists and thinkers’ legacies are either partial, invisible, or altogether lacking.

I found Mireia’s essay in one of about fifteen boxes making up her personal fund, which she has donated to the archive.⁵ The text was in a dossier alongside other organisational documents from the late nineties and lectures on the feminist movement in Barcelona. Mireia’s archive bears witness to her outstanding trajectory as an editor, project manager, and translator at laSal. As I unboxed the written register of Mireia’s voice, I thought of her essay not just as information but as a material object: an affective node of sorts, connecting personal and collective histories and memory.

As Mireia writes alongside her colleagues, Ca la Dona was founded in 1988, a year after a group of local women occupied a municipal building in Poble Sec to raise awareness about the need for a public feminist space. After the occupation, negotiations began, and eventually, the city council of Barcelona agreed to allocate a grant of 200,000 pesetas for the space.⁶ Since then, the House has moved twice: once in 1995 and once in 2012, after the historical building it is currently housed in —a Roman aqueduct—was renovated. “One thing was clear from the beginning, Mireia writes, the building had to be public.”⁷ Her remark is key: it underlines how, at the time of its foundation, there was a shared concern to inhabit, appropriate, and transform public infrastructure on their own terms, and to reclaim public visibility and funding as part of a larger strategy of historical and political repair,⁸ which was particularly necessary in a post-dictatorial political climate.

The term post-dictatorial is key here, as it signals not just a historical period following Franco’s regime but an ongoing condition in which the dictatorship’s spectral presence continues to shape institutions, infrastructures, and cultural memory. Unlike the dominant narrative of the Spanish Transition —which frames the shift to democracy as a model of consensus and rupture with the past— post-dictatorship underscores continuities rather than clean breaks, exposing the ways in which authoritarian legacies persist beneath democratic structures. This perspective aligns Spain with Latin American post-dictatorial contexts, where transitions to democracy have been marked by unresolved political violence, legal impunity, and the endurance of power structures inherited from military or authoritarian regimes. Scholars like Elizabeth Jelin and Nelly Richard have theorised these transitions in Argentina and Chile, respectively, revealing how feminist movements have had to resist both state repression and historical erasure. In Spain, a similar dynamic unfolds: institutions selectively incorporate feminist histories while sidelining their political force. By positioning itself as a self-managed space outside institutional control, Ca la Dona not only resists these erasures but actively reclaims self-managed, public infrastructure as a feminist counter-institution —one that acknowledges the post-dictatorial condition as something that must be continually confronted rather than resolved, while inserting Spain into a broader global field of transitional and memory politics.

Speaking of the violence with which official infrastructures have erased women’s memory, Griselda Pollock argues that “we do not live merely in a culture that has forgotten women. […] We must come to terms with the official and modern erasure of women from the records of culture.”⁹ Women’s legacies in Barcelona are fraught: they were attacked and forgotten during the dictatorship, and art institutions have still not done enough to recover them. However, the city is home to a powerful genealogy of feminist activists and intellectuals who had the initiative —and the means, both intellectual and material— to institute otherwise. These legacies can be traced back to the city’s rich history of anarchist and libertarian movements and initiatives, including feminisms, and their translation, since the late 19th century, into infrastructures, whether spatial, organisational, or intellectual.¹⁰ Thinking from Ca la Dona and laSal, a particular example stands out: the Biblioteca Francesca Bonnemaison, which was founded in 1909 and is the first women’s library in Europe.¹¹ The library, whose original infrastructure included a bar and activities reminiscent of how laSal’s library-bar was first conceived, was a space for women’s free socialising. Currently, the library is publicly funded, hosts a significant collection on Catalan feminisms, and features an associated cultural space.

In her essay, Mireia cites a text by Montse Cervera, another historical activist who is still very active in Ca la Dona, which she wrote for a 1998 issue of the feminist journal Duoda. Reflecting on the foundation of Ca la Dona, she wrote that “what drove women out to the streets was a strong desire to have a space of [their] own.”¹² Contrary to the popular imagination, where protest is seen as a desire for rupture —to end something unfair— public protest here is conceived as an act of instituting: as the desire to build and sustain infrastructure in the middle of the material and intellectual desert of an entire country fresh out of a 40-year-long dictatorship. Cervera states that the desire for a room of their own is what vertebrates feminism in Barcelona in the early Transition period:¹³ movement emerges outwards, as a struggle for social change, but also inwards, as a process of personal development born from desire.¹⁴ One of these fundamental desires was to share a house for women, despite the differences in approach, thought, or identity that were present among the various feminist groups and sexual identities that founded the space.¹⁵ Plurality was one of the core principles of Ca la Dona from the beginning: shared affect, experiences, and legacies, and the continued testing of horizontal modes of governance and decision-making gave way to a different, situated model of knowing.

Building upon this foundation, Ca la Dona's epistemological approach aligns with Elizabeth Grosz's concept of sexed difference as multiplicity, which posits sexual difference as a dynamic and generative force that transcends binary oppositions. Grosz emphasizes that sexual difference is not about essentialising or reproducing a heteronormative order but about the bifurcation of life into at least two sexes, at least two kinds of bodies that love each other.¹⁶ This perspective has enabled Ca la Dona to resist essentialist tendencies over the decades, evolving into a radically trans-inclusive and queer, intergenerational space. The centre explicitly defines itself as a place for “todas las mujeres, lesbianas y trans,”¹⁷ demonstrating its commitment to embracing diverse identities and experiences. This inclusive stance and constant self-awareness and re-situation, which is both a source of pride and sustained emotional labour for the people that make up the community, reflects a deep-seated recognition that difference is not a binary barrier but a source of collective strength and knowledge production, embodying a feminist practice that is both expansive and resilient.

Significantly, a similar kind of desire had prompted the opening of the feminist library-bar laSal just ten years earlier. As the dozens of typewritten notes and minutes in the archive show, there was a desire for laSal to become a plural meeting space from its foundation, embracing the different currents of feminism. The physical space, from which the publishing house was eventually born, was one of the first examples of feminist self-management and the only space dedicated exclusively to showcasing art created by women. It was a hybrid experience, halfway between a bar, a cultural centre, and a feminist reflection space.¹⁸ Though under-recognised beyond its immediate context, laSal represented a crucial experience for the evolution of the Catalan and national feminist movement in post-Franco Spain during the 1970s, serving as a meeting point for both Spanish and international women.¹⁹

The space of Ca la Dona embodies a situated feminist legacy: that of plural material and affective infrastructure-making. Ca la Dona still works as an infrastructure, housing very different groups and forms of feminist action and care —from lesbian activism to antimilitarism, witchcraft, feminist artistic research, pro-independent feminists, Occupy/15M feminist activisms, Latin American feminism, Roma awareness, and many others— who meet periodically in the premises of the new, four-storey building just behind Santa Caterina Market.²⁰ Located on the ground floor next to a large library, the Centre de Documentació (CDOC) hosts the archive. Made up of 80 archival collections, which are donations from artists —or their families— and activist groups, the archive focuses largely on the history of Catalan feminisms, queer and lesbian histories. The web of archive carers²¹ I have met here consists of over a dozen women over 65 and women and non-binary folks in their mid-twenties to early thirties.²² The CDOC operates largely through volunteer labour, with two people paid part-time to handle in-depth cataloguing and project management. Together, they oversee archiving and cataloguing processes, the care and maintenance of the building, funding applications, institutional collaborations, and public programming.

As soon as I found it, I shared Mireia’s 1999 essay with Laura and Rebecca. Later on, Rebecca shared with me video footage of laSal’s stall at the 1985 Feminist State Conference, which was digitised recently. In a grainy, silent scene, we spot a younger Mari and Mireia sitting behind their stall, looking pensive as they arrange the piles of books that make up laSal’s collection (fig. 1). A close shot of Mari’s ringed hands as she touches the books before placing them in a neat pile reminds me of a mother gently dressing her baby (fig. 2) —a mothering analogy that, as I would later on discover, is part of her thinking.

Fig. 1 Fig. 1. Mari Chordà and Mireia Bofill at the Feminist State Conference, 1985. Video still. Centre de Documentació, Ca la Dona, 2024

Fig. 2. Fig. 2. Mari Chordà at the Feminist State Conference, 1985. Video still. Centre de Documentació, Ca la Dona, 2024

The video file contains a stream of compelling scenes from the conference, which bear witness to the feminist political climate of the mid-eighties. A short-haired woman sings a song about love between women with her guitar: “Acerca tu corazón al mío, para que cuentes su latido.”²³ In another scene, a group of activists from across the whole country are gathered around a small round table and a stretcher with white sheets, in dim light, facing the camera, ready to be recorded. They are standing in front of several purple banners advocating for free and legal abortion, which had not yet been achieved under the Socialist government in place since 1980.²⁴

On the table are two half-filled glass Coke bottles with what appears to be blood, alongside various instruments —a speculum, cannulas, napkins. As one of the women explains, these are the essential tools to perform an abortion: the bottles contain two extractions that took place that very morning as part of their protest— one at six weeks, the other at five.²⁵ The scene evokes a gathering of guardians or witnesses, charged with a shared mission and the weight of their cause. Being here together, connecting with their experience and courage, and talking about the huge setback that women’s reproductive rights are currently facing in the West, I feel that we somehow become a part of their legacy, bound by emotion, motherly encouragement, and a common purpose.

Archives are acts of motherhood, a passing on of the life energy of our actions, our words, for our daughters to use. It is a first step in claiming our place in time; our answer to the colonizer who tells us we do not exist.

Centre de Documentació, Ca la Dona

C/Ripoll, 8, Barcelona

15 April 2024

In my time at the archive, I have found that informally sharing with others is a fundamental aspect of being part of the space. I only found out with practice: it was through talking that I eventually found out last week I still had 15 more boxes to go through. Out of sheer luck, I crossed Montse Roset, one of the senior women volunteers of the CDOC, just when I thought I was good to go, and she told me —in the stern, concerned tone of a strict mother— that I’d missed out on a third of the boxes. I realised then that she was probably the only person at the archive who knew that, and that the knowledge she’d just passed on was a proud effort to care both for laSal’s legacy and for my research. This also made me realise that, by the end of my stay, I would be the best-acquainted person with the contents of laSal’s unindexed archive, even if my memory can fail me and my findings —starting with knowing how many boxes I have to look into— feel somewhat fortuitous, driven by specific interests, moods, time constraints, shifting desires, and feelings.

Speaking of feelings, in a recent encounter, my mentor Elke Krasny, who is a feminist scholar, asked me: “Is there a space for one’s feelings in academic writing? Can bodily questions alter the research materials?”²⁷

Thinking about Elke’s question here, it becomes clear that not just my own, but their bodily questions and circumstances also alter the research materials. This month, I have been talking to Mari and Mireia —who are in their mid-eighties— about laSal. There are discrepancies in memory, there are unspoken rifts, there are memory gaps, there are times when the mind wanders and questions do not get answered in a clear way, there are materials for the interview forgotten at the studio, there is unpredictability and there is tiredness.

In other words: there is bodily fragility.

But there is also acuerpamiento —a sense of mothering, and trust: a generous act of embracing me and my endeavours that resonates with my experience at the archive. There are gifts, both material and timely: a stack of books from Mari, conversations, and shared moments with the others. In a way, I feel that these are not bodily questions —they are bodily answers.

Through engaging with and contributing to the space, I find myself becoming part of a network of relationships grounded in trust, evoking the concept of affidamento. Rooted in Italian feminist theory, affidamento emphasises nurturing, trust-based relationships between women, particularly across generations.²⁸ Indeed, Italian feminism served as a profound inspiration for the feminist movement in Barcelona, especially in the 1980s, influencing its approach to solidarity, collective care, and symbolic lineage. This influence is deeply felt among the archive’s older guardians, who are not only well-versed in Italian feminist thought and identify with it, but, like Montse, embody its principles through their custodial roles.²⁹ At the archive, affidamento extends beyond personal connections to include the materials themselves, which act as vessels of memory, affect, and symbolic motherhood. These forms of affidamento weave together people, predecessors, books, archival objects, and potential new uses and readings, transforming the archive into a space where care, trust, and shared experience interlink, blending practical stewardship with a powerful, intergenerational sense of belonging and purpose that moves forward.

LaSal’s publishing work shows a deep theoretical commitment to feminist materialism and sexual difference, drawing on a variety of contexts, among them those of Spain and Italy. As Mireia Bofill recalls, laSal was supposed to publish the key text Don’t Think You Have Any Rights by the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, but, because of their closure in 1990 due to personal ruptures in the collective, it was not possible to do it on time.³⁰ However, their commitment to practices of affidamento —a present reality at Ca la Dona’s archive— is amply visible in their trajectory.

LaSal’s editorial practice and work ethic reflected a shared commitment to fostering deep connections —as friends, collaborators, and producers of knowledge.³¹ This ethos extended not only to their team and their local and global network of authors, nurtured through regular encounters and thoughtful letters, often suggesting meticulous translations and edits, but also to their engagement with Spanish women’s history. For example, laSal actively sought to recover the silenced voices of Republican women thinkers, exemplified by their publication of Clara Campoamor’s 1935 essay El voto femenino y yo, which recounts her pivotal role in securing voting rights for Spanish women.³²

Equally significant, laSal championed Catalan women writers by publishing their works in their native language for the first time. For example, Cartes a L’Anna Murià (1939-1956), a collection of correspondence between writers Mercè Rodoreda and Anna Murià written during their exile,³³ serves as a testament to laSal’s dedication to women’s affect and life writing, highlighting their focus on intergenerational feminist heritage.

Centre de Documentació, Ca la Dona

C/Ripoll, 8, Barcelona

10 April 2024

Can a political climate be described by the weather in the city? How does one write a political atmosphere? How does a woman write herself into it, out of it, or across it? How does material, atmospheric, or political conditioning affect the development of feminist knowledge, both in the past and in the present?

How does speaking up after forty years of silence feel in the body? How does writing and publishing in Catalan after forty years of prohibition feel in the body? How does reading now, about them speaking up then, feel in the body? How do foreign languages feel in the body? How does the disappearance of the mother feel in the body?

How does the affective, intellectual, and spatial movement of weaving networks of affect and resistance become hampered by droughts, fires, and floods, both symbolic and literal? How does it become fraught when in touch with official infrastructures? How can we unmute the past that is muted in mainstream culture?

LaSal’s unindexed archive at Ca la Dona includes Mireia Bofill’s and Mari Chordà’s donations. As previously noted, Mireia’s fund is full of organisational, economic, and administrative documents from laSal, vast amounts of printing plates, letters to authors and institutions, funding applications, translator’s notes, and hundreds of brochures from international publishing houses. After laSal’s closure in 1990, her archive attests to her continued engagement with Ca la Dona and a comprehensive network of feminist agents and institutions in Barcelona; institutional, gender-based policymaking on a local, national, and international level; knowledge production and dissemination.

As for Mari’s fund, it reflects the inner world of one of the most underrated yet powerful visual artists and poets in the country, and a deeply layered understanding of feminist cultural practice where ethics and aesthetics, the visual and the literary, the discursive and the carnal, the personal and the collective, are perfectly balanced.

Mari’s fund is made up of about twenty boxes filled with letters, tapes, negatives, photos, drawings, printing plates, meeting minutes and organisational documents, exhibition brochures (both her own and from artists around the world), zines, and a vast amount of visual inspiration for her art: postcards, newspaper clippings, collages. There are also another ten unmarked boxes labeled “laSal,” mostly packed with administrative, organisational, and financial documents.

The archive offers a vast amount of information about the affective world of laSal, as told through the material traces saved by Mari —“the soul of laSal,” as feminist scholar Assumpta Bassas described her—³⁴ and Mireia, who was quieter but no less essential to the project’s growth and impact. Above all, their joint efforts to weave a community, both locally and internationally, materially and symbolically, are felt in their correspondence, publications, collection index, or open letters to laSal’s extended community in Barcelona and internationally.

During my time at the archive, I have met Elena Castro Córdoba. She is a volunteer here and she just handed in her PhD dissertation, which looks at the funds of lesbian philosopher and activist Gretel Ammann at Ca la Dona.

Reading it now, it makes a lot of sense to find out that the stone walls of the current building belong to a 2,000-year-old aqueduct. Echoing Ann Cvetkovich’s remark that “the history of any archive is a history of space,”³⁵ Elena reflects on how the material and symbolic reality of water has been a constitutive part of the feminist archive.

Elena remarks on the tension between the element of water —the fluidity and fragility of feminist and queer memory— and the heaviness of the stone that protects the archive.³⁶ Her reflections on water, enclosed books, and stone walls make me recall my first conversation with Mari at a Chinese restaurant, during the first week of my stay here.

Speaking of laSal’s name —“the salt” in English, a reference to sea water and feminist waves— she recalled:

The bar opened in 1977, and the publishing house in 1978. First, the publishing house was in front of the bar: the bar was on Calle Riereta 8, and the publishing house on Riereta 13. But when we saw that the house was sinking and all our books were getting wet, because it kept raining then, we got hold of the ground floor on number 2, where Colita lived.³⁷ The image of the books getting soaked was terrible. They were our children.³⁸

As I listened to Mari’s voice recounting the origins of laSal, I noticed Assumpta Bassas beside me, jotting notes on the paper tablecloth —an understated, demure gesture that, I thought, seemed perfectly suited to preserving these shreds of Mari’s memory without interrupting her. Amid a seemingly structured recounting of laSal’s early days, Mari’s narrative suddenly took an unexpected turn: what began as a straightforward account —dates, locations— was abruptly disrupted by the fragmented, emotionally charged memory of a flood. She described the water seeping in, books getting soaked, the memory of the books, perceived as “children” —an image, I realise now, perfectly aligned with my impression of her hands lovingly arranging their books at the stall— interrupting and deepening her narrative. This sudden shift captured how affective memory operates: not as a smooth narrative but as something fragmented, alive with emotional weight. Traumatic memory surfaces unprompted, as if the vivid, unresolved image of soaked books was pressing its way through, defying a purely factual retelling.

Resonating with the motions of Mari’s memory, Ann Cvetkovich writes that “trauma serves as a point of entry into a vast archive of feelings, the many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame, and more that are part of the vibrancy of queer cultures”.³⁹

Mari’s memory of the flood reminded me of something I found in laSal’s yearly Woman’s Agenda, which she had coedited with Mireia and others.⁴⁰ In the 1981 issue, there is a marked date for the first anniversary of the day that the women’s library in Barcelona burned to the ground —1 April 1980:

1 APRIL — On 1 April 1980, the Women’s Bookshop caught fire. Although this was a major blow, as the losses were significant, the determination of the women who ran it, along with the solidarity of everyone to keep this space alive, made it possible for it to reopen. Today marks a year since then.⁴¹

The introduction of rituals of grief and remembrance into the collective consciousness is deeply significant. Equally important is the sense of inevitability that fire —or water— brings about. These elements highlight a very real, material contrast: volatility and permanence, fluidity and heaviness, love and grief. Feminist cultural practices in this particular geopolitical space often grapple with these tensions: they involve the labour of unearthing and prevailing with love, with others, only to face the threat of repeated erasure. This erasure can come from official museological narratives, government bodies, or something as tangible as water seeping through the ceiling of a derelict basement, washing away hours, months, or years of work.

Woven into voices and materials, an ongoing dance of loss and restitution underlines both the importance and the fragility of bodily memory. Together, these antagonistic forces shape the precarious histories of feminist and queer heritage in post-dictatorial Spain: cultures both threatened by patriarchal and neoliberal dynamics of preservation and governance, and haunted by the aftermath of the political trauma of forty years of dictatorship. Through bodily memory, we learn that building feminist community, knowledge, and memory by mobilising and preserving both knowledge and affect is an essential yet inherently fragile enterprise. As Ann Cvetkovich writes in An Archive of Feelings: “in the absence of institutionalised documentation or in opposition to official histories, memory becomes a valuable historical resource, and ephemeral and personal collections of objects stand alongside the documents of the dominant culture in order to offer alternative modes of knowledge.”⁴²

A’s Living Room

Barcelona, 10 July 2024

The presence and absence of our feminist memory seems to reflect larger tensions around feminist heritage that I’m trying to grapple with. I think they could be summarised with the following prerogative: live, and you will become forever underground, partly invisible to the outside world. Die, and you might end up buried in the Museum archive, with honours. Or you might shine while you are still alive, if the Gods of neoliberalism allow. Granted, in a white cube, your individual genius enshrined.

This dichotomy was present in Mari’s ambivalent feelings towards the two major art institutions in the country. On the one hand, I was moved by her relief at finally having a solo show at MACBA⁴³ at the tender age of 83⁴⁴ —"¡Hoooombre, ya era hora!" ("Gosh, it was about time!")— she replied to me, a single line on a WhatsApp voice note as I congratulated her on the upcoming opening in July⁴⁵. On the other, she made explicit her anger at Reina Sofía for engulfing a lifetime’s worth of donations and parking them in a hard-to-access archive, without much public return⁴⁶, as she had previously shared with me and Assumpta Bassas over coffee on my first week here, and later on in a recorded interview.

Archiva is a made-up word in Spanish that conjugates the noun archivo in the feminine form. It is important to point out that I am calling this place archiva, and not archivo, because that’s how it is referred to by many people in the house.

FemArt, a collective of feminist activists and artists that was founded in Ca la Dona in 1992 and is still active to date,⁴⁷ defines this archiva as a creative space overflowing with emotion and affect that defies:

History with a capital H, law enforcement, and the repressive State apparatuses which inflict violence upon our bodies with their dynamics of amnesia and oblivion. […] Like our creative capacity, the archiva is a welcoming, dynamic, inclusive and generous sphere, always open to new additions and exchanges.⁴⁸

Challenging the conservative, prescriptive nature of official historiography and museums, where artistic practices remain “in a state of limitation, submission and reclusion inside an institution that wants to govern them” —process FemArt refers to as “necrocreativity”⁴⁹— alternative archival practices bring the past back to life in a dynamic way, mixing it with new possibilities and creating expressions and images for the future.

In contrast to the archiva, the art institution emerges as rigid, systematically excluding and overlooking generations of feminist artists and cultural agents from its canon, as noted by Griselda Pollock. This tendency is only beginning to be timidly reversed with archival and exhibition practices —such as Chordà’s much delayed solo show— which, necessary though they may be, also isolate and extract life, taking the collective body away from women artists’ lives, its white cube formats mercilessly assimilating them to the male genius archetype museums are still so proud of.

In order to think about how these archival practices weave together forms of heritage from a feminist lens, I draw on Jorge Otero-Pailos’s concept of experimental preservation, which frames heritage as dynamic, multidimensional, and evolving,⁵⁰ rather than static and material. Otero-Pailos sees preservation as a “generative act,” one that allows for the “reconfiguration of the past in the present” and invites new forms of engagement and meaning-making.

Both in laSal’s editorial practice and in Ca la Dona, this ethos is mirrored in the ways feminist histories are not merely stored and passed down as goods in a will, but actively reanimated and projected into futurity through intimate, affective interactions with literary/archival objects and people. Rather than simply preserving artefacts, these practices embody a living, relational process, where the materials become vehicles of memory and community, engaging successive generations in a shared, ongoing lineage of feminist resistance and knowledge. This reimagined approach to preservation honours the emotional resonance of objects, the voices of those present as they relate to historical memory, and the relationships formed, creating an “experimental” and fluid web that adapts, evolves, and, like Otero-Pailos’s vision, transforms how we experience heritage in the present.

In the case of feminist and queer histories, experimental preservation is shaped both by a feminist care ethics and a militant vocation to create and maintain autonomous spaces that cater for the needs and sensitivities of the life stories housed, but also the undeniable reality of material necessity: when our stories have been erased time and again, when institutions and archives and governments have remained oblivious to the value of these histories and practices, activism is a form of survival. In other words, experimental preservation is simply an act of self-preservation that mobilises a feminist ethics of the possible.

I see Ca la Dona’s archival practice as a living space that embodies laSal’s legacies, and both as defined by the joyful, resilient weaving together of spatial, temporal, material, and affective infrastructure, which is expansive but also situated and historical. This weaving practice is defined by gentle, liquid, bodily movements where the memory of our ancestors is summoned and the voices of the older archive guardians, present with us, are heard alongside unboxed materials, and become part of the younger generation’s knowledge and emotional universe.

This idea complements Griselda Pollock’s work on Generations and Geographies, where feminist legacies are seen not as fixed genealogies but as fluid webs of connection across time and space, aligning with feminist practices of care and matronomic transmission. These practices embody, in themselves, generations of feminist affect and therefore, the affective intellectual legacies of this specific geography, to use Pollock’s terms for referring to the importance of safeguarding specific, embodied manifestations of feminist culture.

While this infrastructure develops outside institutionalised spaces —whether academic, governmental, or curatorial— it emerges in direct and tense relationship to them, an endeavour that has only grown with time. Understanding the relationship between these affective infrastructures as they are activated by different generations across time allows me, as a Spain-born feminist, and those I speak to, to be touched by our feminist legacies in a more profound way. Rather than seeing them as images of feminism in a certain space-time, we are able to shape the feminist politics that continue to take place here and now, and preserve feminist forms of emancipation that feed into Spain's political history, from and through archival practice.

As Pollock argues:

The practices of specific women are the starting point for a polyvocal debate that reveals the significance attached to each person’s specific history and relation to histories, each person's location and relation to cultural and social geographies through diaspora, displacement, revolution, war, migration and so forth.⁵¹

Centre de Documentació, Ca la Dona

C/Ripoll, 8, Barcelona

10 April 2024

I have decided to extend my time in the archiva, to stay longer, to return. There is no archiva without relationships —without attaching to findings and people, without working and spending time together. In being here, I too am becoming an informal, satellite carer of this place, perhaps even a long-distance member of its extended community.

Writing from the body, in community, is the only way to reflect on the place’s —and laSal’s— legacies with any authenticity. This realisation is both beautiful and overwhelming, so I let the feeling rest.

Now, I know things and people I did not before. I feel touched. Coming here has been a radically welcoming experience: a womb. Perhaps that is what matronomy is. Almost fifty years since laSal’s founding, I can feel the desires articulated in their original meetings roaming the space of Ca la Dona. Not just in the photographs and minutes I unbox from the archiva, but in the voices and presences that now populate it —including mine.

My time here, unboxing laSal’s past, has been coloured by them all. The reluctance I carried with me —the unease of entering the archive to “carry out academic fieldwork”— has left me. Or rather, I have allowed the space to transform me. Conversations and experiences have made it clear that my responsibility is no longer to write about laSal, but with and from the body of laSal, as I sit with it, with them, in this space, in this city, in 2024.

Now, my work is to touch, retrieve, honour, sort through, befriend, and recover the immense intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, and relational legacies of the first women who built a full-scale feminist publishing house in my country —one that reclaimed key feminist voices and issues after Franco. These women were artists, historians, editors, translators. Some I am lucky to speak with today. Some are only now emerging from total invisibility in State museums and the art world.

In the same way they held my body close and gave me a sense of purpose —me acuerparon— it is now my responsibility to hold theirs —acuerparlas. In doing so, I hope to reclaim these legacies for what they are: our neglected feminist heritage, our matronomies —the ways in which we have built and governed ourselves, fragile yet enduring.

If the museum isolates and aestheticises feminist histories within its glass cases, Ca la Dona refuses such containment, offering an active counter-model —an embodied, affective space where feminist legacies are not only preserved but lived. Unlike the museum’s extractive logic, which absorbs feminist cultural production while severing it from its infrastructures of care and political urgency, Ca la Dona’s archiva operates through ongoing negotiation and relational practice. It demonstrates how feminist heritage can be sustained not through exhibitionary freezing and archival gatekeeping but through active, collective engagement. Here, knowledge is not embalmed; it circulates, shifts, and remains in movement, shaped by the needs and desires of those who hold and tend to it.

Against the museum’s taxonomy, the archiva enacts a relational counter-historiography, one that resists the institutional framing of feminist legacies as isolated artefacts rather than networks of living, breathing connections. Yet this resistance is not simply an opposition —it also reveals the museum’s paradoxical role in both preserving and erasing feminist infrastructures. Reina Sofía, Spain’s largest contemporary art museum, plays a key part in this paradox. In recent years, Reina Sofía has actively sought to produce a counterhegemonic canon of political art history, one that reclaims histories of resistance and expands the boundaries of cultural heritage. While this represents a significant shift away from hegemonic, depoliticised narratives of Spanish modernity, the museum still struggles to break away from its foundational epistemic structures. Feminism, even when acknowledged, often remains information behind glass —a testament to what women did, rather than a practice that shapes the institution from within. The museum’s collection and critical curatorial apparatus has largely subsumed feminist cultural production into historical proof, situating feminisms in the Spanish state as documentation of political struggle rather than an active and self-standing practice.

This tension —the partial incorporation of feminist histories into the museum while severing them from their lifeworlds— is palpable. Feminist labour, once ignored, is now selectively displayed, but under conditions of containment that deny its full political force. The museum renders feminist knowledge visible, but inert. It preserves, but it does not sustain. It exhibits, but it does not engage.

By contrast, Ca la Dona offers a model of feminist latency as a generative force—one that resists the museum’s archival taxonomies and extractive temporality. While matronomy highlights the governance of feminist legacies, weaving, as enacted both by laSal and the archiva, embodies its methods. These practices of preservation and care —emotional, relational, and collective— form part of a transgenerational feminist geography that has been repeatedly wounded by museum apparatuses that extract and taxonomise rather than sustain. Instead, the archiva’s legacies enact a relational, living historiography, cared for collectively and resisting within the everyday.

Here, intimacy —practiced through embodied engagement in an expansive, intergenerational infrastructure of feminist affect and resistance in Spanish history— becomes a tool for feminist knowledge production and preservation, destabilising the private/public dyad and demonstrating how the personal remains political.