
On Sunday May 27, after a week of occupation, we opened the doors of the new Self-managed Occupied Gymnasium.
The Occupied Health Gym “La Salud” is an old gymnasium in the neighborhood of La Salut de Gràcia, which has been abandoned for the last 5 years. We want it to be an open space in the neighborhood, which will allow us to strengthen the ties of our community. We want the neighbors to feel free to enter, participating in scheduled activities or proposing new ones.
We live in our neighborhoods besieged by speculation, gentrification and capitalism, which every day leaves us without a house, without spaces, without the possibility of carrying out a dignified life.
We have to pay ever higher rents, work more hours for a more precarious salary. We have little time to be able to take care of ourselves and take care of others. We have to leave our neighborhoods to those with the highest purchasing power, while real estate, builders, banks and individuals fill their pockets.
They force us into a miserable life that goes through the commodification of time, spaces, bodies and relationships.
We opened this gym to take care of ourselves. We do not want our Health to depend on the economy. We see the need to open a space where we can work our bodies, to prioritize the health of each one’s purchasing power and to be able to train ourselves in the different sports disciplines that interest us.
We want to move forward, together, towards a better self-knowledge of our bodies.
We open this gym because we need to organize our self-defense. We need to be prepared if we want to fight against the police, judges, politicians, city councils, negotiations, fascisms, patriarchy. Everything that upholds this unjust system.
We need a space to make ourselves strong, to prepare a daily resistance based on ties and relationships of respect and companionship. We need to know how to attack.
We need to know how to run quickly too, just in case. Dodge the blows and be able to answer. We need to know our limits, to share them with our partners and to grow a community based on mutual support. We need to self-organize ourselves, because we have the strength to do it and we do not want to delegate it to anyone, technicians, politicians or presidents.
Only then are we free to decide for ourselves.
We need to be able to reapply ourselves of a healthy life to defend ourselves from all of this. We need to be able to train without having to pay a monthly fee to keep our bodies in shape, creating a place of trust, free and safe. Where they have no place, no masclisms, no fascisms, no other behaviors or shit attitudes. We need to be able to decide on our body and our health.
The Occupied Health Gym “La Salud” is an old gymnasium in the neighborhood of La Salut de Gràcia, which has been abandoned for the last 5 years. We want it to be an open space in the neighborhood, which will allow us to strengthen the ties of our community. We want the neighbors to feel free to enter, participating in scheduled activities or proposing new ones.okupas in Gracia
The Self-Managed Occupational Gym «Health» is our counterattack.
We welcome you and we invite you today, after 12:00 a.m., at the inauguration of the gym at Maignon 44, underground Lesseps!
original in Catalan