Welcome to reMADE

Associacio MADE, a registered non-for-profit association, was founded in Barcelona in 2013. The space and the association is entirely financed by membership fees and support of the community in form of donations.

Our current iteration is called reMADE and has been open since 2024.

Our Mission

We are more than just a shared work space by being…

a safe haven for creation that celebrates both the collective and individual path towards learning, skill sharing and the cross-pollination of ideas;

a place where people can comfortably create and experiment within a diverse community without judgement or prejudice;

a space for daring to grow, create and experiment beyond your limits.

Our Vision

Our vision of this reMADE is to have a curated collective that empowers creativity, innovation and learning through playful experimentation. We are respectful of the shared space, our individual use of it and the people within.

We run as a democratic association with clearly defined processes for how we operate and collaborate, albeit being a group of misfits that come together to make shit and learn how to make shit, while prioritising our goal of organic, mindful growth and longevity for the association.

Like a human library, we foster a place where creation gets us over our individual differences and divisions; where people don’t say ‘No’ to other people’s ideas but ‘Yes, and.’ Through this blending of people with various levels of skills and creative juices, we empower a collaborative environment where the development of concepts and ideas reigns, without crushing other’s thoughts or contributions.

With collective collaboration, we strive to create art pieces and community projects that engage every member. We seek cross-pollination by fostering collaboration and exchanges with other makerspaces and collectives both locally and internationally.

History of MADE

MADE was created in 2013, as a shared idea by James Brazil, Camilo Valdivia and Ugo Riboni, with tons of input and support from Cecilia Tham, while they were all working out of the MOB coworking space which Cecila directed.

Each of the founders, for different reasons, felt the need for a space where they could work on projects related to technology, art and generally have the equipment to experiment with turning ideas and concepts into reality, openly and together with a community of like minded people.

At the time Barcelona had a few commercial spaces with the right equipment, a large FabLab with excellent machines that for various reasons was really hard to access by the public, and a few tiny hackerspaces mostly connected to the squatter movement. None of these spaces fit their needs and this presented the opportunity to create something new.

The initial idea was to create a fabrication and prototyping space as part of MOB, but it became clear as soon as the planning started that having a fully independent entity was necessary to ensure that the project could grow in any direction the community wanted, regardless of the intentions of the founders. Placing the community first and taking decisions as democratically as possible was one of the factors that contributed to attract the solid group of initial users that allowed the space to survive during the set up phase.

Cecilia and MOB were very supportive of the idea and allowed MADE to use part of the basement at MOB, initially for free and then with a progressively increasing rental fee, until it had enough members to sustain itself and keep growing (roughly six months later). The contact with MOB was also essential in providing the amount of exposure needed to attract more smart and creative people to join our ranks.

In 2014 we started renting a laser cutter from the fine people at Laser Project and this provided us with another big influx of members, excited by the possibilities of the machine. With a growing user base, and limited by the opening times of MOB and the security implications of sharing a space with another organization, we decided to find a new home in the summer of 2014. Fabrica Lehmann ended up being our choice and we moved in in June, with finally a space we could fully control and that would allow us room to grow under our own terms.

In 2017, due to a sudden increase in rent from a greedy landlord, Made started the search for a new home.
We eventually settled on a much larger space in Sants, and committed to grow the organization into the big and beautiful makerspace we always knew that we could be.

This new venue, with its 600m2 of floor space, allowed the community to expand to a peak of around 45 members, many of which with permanent spaces.
We managed to keep a diverse calendar of events running regularly almost every day of the week, for some years in a row.

During this period, besides the regular flow of artists, hackers and tinkerers, we also incubated a number of tiny companies that found working in our kind of creative environment ideal, as well as various members who developed their own small scale independent gigs with the help of the knowledge and equipment found in the space.

Sadly this iteration had to come to an end too. The global pandemic of 2019 hit the space hard, but we managed to survive it, even if a large number of members were lost.

While still recovering, the landlord sold the property out to a vulture fund just before our contract needed to be renewed. These speculators asked for a disproportionate increase in our rent, which we could not afford. No one in the community had the energy to fight, or to find a new space on very short notice.
We barely had the energy to find temporary homes for our bigger machines, sell everything else for scrap, and put the legal entity in deep freeze.

reMADE (2024)

In 2023, a new group of makers, largely unaffiliated with the previous community, started looking into setting up a new makerspace.
Eventually they found a great warehouse near Navas, in one of the rare city blocks where the noise of making things would have little risk of bothering neighbors.
It was decided by the few members left in the original group to pass on the control of the MADE legal entity, together with what little assets remained attached to it.
This allowed the fourth iteration of MADE to begin, almost one year after it had to close.
Most of 2023 was spent on extensive renovations of the warehouse, recovering the old equipment, and settings up the new community structure and principles.

(re)MADE officially opened to new members outside of the founding group in early 2024.
This history is currently being written…