Ⓐ-casă (at home or the anarchist house in Romanian) is an informal action group based on anti-capitalist, ecological, feminist, queer and non-discriminatory principles. We organize together actions, protests and many other events regarding issues such as gold mining, fracking, gentrification, racial discrimination, animal rights and we also take action against the political class. Through all the activities we are opposing existing structures and seek to develop an alternative critical mass of people that are able to take action collectively. Our actions are supported through donations and voluntary work. We need a permanent space that we can use on longterm.
We are based in Cluj city, Cluj county, in Romania. At the moment there is a lack of information and alternative spaces where groups could get organised in the area. In general, the perspective of the Romanian people is over conservative (church and religious traditions are over represented), so issues like gender or sex are rarely debated. On the other side there is a pro european liberal ideology that’s reflected in public discourse. There’s also a big ethnic segregation that’s blocking multi-ethnical and cultural cooperation.
We feel it will be hard to maintain a radical space in a context of ”europeanisation” and we will need to fight constantly with the trendy activism that’s coming with that. Also, on long-term there’s a need for involvement from more initiatives that are taking radical action and are willing to support the space. Cluj in an intense gentrification process and is becoming a very expensive city. This is highly reflected in the rent prices and the social housing fund available.
Our current space is supported by donations from people, during different public events where we served our home-brewed beer, home-baked bread and vegan food. As we had to pay a monthly rent, we felt the pressure of organizing parties or bigger events in order to gather the money. During the events it was hard to focus on political aspects and also it was/is hard to maintain the safe place Ⓐ-casă wants to be.
We imagine having a permanent safe space where groups and individuals can meet and organize events and activities or discuss, get informed. Our group plans to continue with our activities sand to develop the free library and info shop. The place could be used also for hosting traveller activists.
The house will be open to any group that keeps to a critical and radical approach and wants to organise an event or a meeting, or wants to get involved in the decision process of that house. We don’t want to become a „cool“ place where „alternative“ stuff is happening, but nothing radical and political.
Whenever there are public events the house will be open to anyone, but outside public events there might be a schedule. We don’t want to have the space open all the time for everyone. We would like to maintain a safer space and work in the direction of making people understand what that is and what our principles are.
We want to create a strong network of groups that are doing political work and open spaces for these groups to be able to function. We want to continue the activities and projects we are already involved in and depending on the context we are eager to take action against injustice and inequality.
We avoid formal power as much as possible. We are sharing infrastructure resources and information within the group and sometimes outside the group. We try to be aware of existing informal power and challenge it by discussions and rotating tasks.
We plan to collectively manage (horizontally organized, using consensus decision making process) this house. We want to extend our local network and invite other groups that share the same ideology to use the space.
At the moment there are a handful of people that are and will be active in Cluj and are willing to get involved in running this project on longterm and making it selfsustainable. We plan to develop this space as a platform in which new groups that will be active in the house will be also invited to take part into the decision making and management of the space.
We talked about this house being part of a local network of autonomous social and living spaces that will all support each other and take action against all forms of oppression. We see this space as a starting point for developing this network, giving a possible example for radical longterm sustainable organising.
We are flexible in finding a place that fits our needs and can be bought with the amount of money we manage to gather.
The prices for the houses fulfilling our needs vary between 55.000 and 60.000 euros.
If you would like to support us, please make a donation in the bank account of Spatiu 161 NGO
Spatiu 161
IBAN: RO70BTRLEURCRT0397593901
SWIFT: BTRLRO22
Banca Transilvania
Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania
Thank you for reading our proposal! Contact us at spatiu161 at riseup dot net for any questions.