About Us
For more than 30 years, Genalguacil has woven contemporary art, local traditions, culture, and nature into the fabric of everyday village life. What began as a deliberate act of refusal — a small rural community choosing imagination over decline — has become Genalguacil Pueblo Museo: a living museum where artworks, landscapes, memories, and daily routines are part of the same shared fabric.
Over time, this has created something deeper than events and exhibitions. It has built relationships, confidence, skills, and ways of working together. It has shown that small rural places can be sites of imagination, learning, and renewal — not only places to be protected, but communities actively shaping their own futures.
LAB Genalguacil grows out of this same spirit of refusal and possibility. It brings together what the village already knows with expertise, methodologies, and partnerships that travel across regions and countries — allowing innovation to emerge through exchange rather than extraction.
Villages are not testing grounds for external solutions. They are places where knowledge already lives: in crafts, farming, care, maintenance, storytelling, making, and the everyday invention of new ways of doing things.
Innovation starts from what is already present. Through shared meals, workshops, walks, conversations, artistic practice, and hands-on experimentation, people come together to explore new possibilities for work, livelihoods, services, and collective entrepreneurship. Learning happens by doing, and doing happens in relation to place and to one another.
LAB Genalguacil is an open space for collaboration between artists, producers, farmers, entrepreneurs, people who work in public life, researchers, students, and neighbours. Projects are not designed for communities — they grow with communities, through trust, long-term relationships, and shared responsibility.
Our focus is on how art, culture, heritage, and ecology can help rural places respond to real and present challenges. Not as abstract strategies, but as practical, lived processes rooted in everyday life.
While grounded in Genalguacil, the lab is connected to wider learning networks, research partnerships, and policy conversations across Spain and Europe — so that local experimentation becomes part of broader dialogues, and wider frameworks remain accountable to lived realities.
LAB Genalguacil is not just a project or a programme. It is an ongoing practice of listening, meeting, making, and learning together — a way of treating the village itself as a studio, a classroom, and a commons.
Descentralization
Small and interrelated is beautiful
For us, decentralization is not about fragmentation, but about distributed strength. It means many places, each with their own rhythms, histories, and capacities — independent, yet deeply connected. Rather than concentrating opportunity in a few centres, we work to strengthen local ability to imagine, organise, and act. Rural territories are not peripheral to innovation — they are essential spaces where new relationships between economy, ecology, and community can be shaped. From here, change grows outward through networks rather than hierarchies.
Innovation
Tradition, art, culture, and nature
At LAB Genalguacil, innovation does not arrive as a product or a policy. It grows through everyday practice — through making, repairing, cooking, walking, listening, experimenting, and telling stories. Here, innovation happens when artists sit with farmers, when civil servants work alongside neighbours, when students learn from elders, and when ideas are tested not in simulations, but in lived reality. Tradition and contemporary practice meet — not as opposites, but as sources of shared imagination. We believe rural places are not waiting to catch up with the future. They are already inventing different ways of living well, and these ways matter deeply in times of ecological and social change.
Knowledge Exchange
Sharing expertise and experience
We understand knowledge as something that is made together, not transferred from experts to users. It moves through conversation, shared labour, mistakes, reflection, and small successes. It lives in hands and habits, in stories and skills, in memories and experiments. What we learn in one place is not copied elsewhere, but translated and adapted through local realities and desires. At LAB Genalguacil, learning happens through encounters — across disciplines, generations, and ways of life.
Regenerative Economy
The rural way
Development has too often followed extractive paths — taking value from places without giving back, treating land and communities as resources to be used, measuring success only through growth and scale. We work toward different economic logics: regenerative, relational, and rooted in care for place. This means creating livelihoods that strengthen ecosystems, sustain cultural practices, and support collective wellbeing. It means valuing durability over speed, reciprocity over accumulation, and shared benefit over individual gain. In this way, rural economies become not engines of extraction, but spaces of renewal — where prosperity is measured in resilience, connection, and the ability to remain and thrive.
The space
LAB Genalguacil
Once a bank, now a laboratory for shared futures. This building — once the financial heart of the village — has become a place where people gather to imagine, test, and grow new ways of doing things together.
It is a working space. Knowledge moves through hands, conversations, and experiments. Skills are shared, ideas are tested, and things are made. What happens here is practical before it is theoretical — and often most interesting when it is both at once.
People come from different backgrounds, disciplines, and places, and work side by side. Out of that proximity something grows that none of them could have reached alone. It has always been this way: small groups of people, acting together, change how things are done.
The space is open to co-production across people, places, and practices. A reminder that transformation begins not with grand plans, but with shared work, shared care, and shared responsibility.
LAB Collective
We are individuals from diverse backgrounds, all united by a common goal: to catalyse new practices of innovation - to foster equality and justice. We believe in the power of collaboration and the exchange of ideas. We fuse tradition, art, culture, and heritage to co-create opportunities with and for people and places. We come from various fields, including entrepreneurship, farming, civil service, production, research, arts, design, and education. Together, including you, we form a community committed to making a positive impact in rural regions. With a shared vision and a strong sense of purpose, we're turning rural areas into places of innovation, well-being, and creativity.
Maria de los Angeles Rubio
Biologist, rural innovator.
Marianne Blom Brodersen
Social anthropologist, transformative potentialities of rituals, art and social movements, alternative social organization and collective entrepreneurship and innovation.
Alex
Using technology as a tool for collaboration and collective action in place
Raluca Harabagiu
Raluca Harabagiu is a creative communicator, storyteller, curator and creator of women-led communities and projects. She is also a published author.
Cristina Marquez
Social innovation and rural development
Our Partners
Our work grows through connection. Not from a centre outward, but between people, places, and practices that find each other across distance and difference.
We work with partners who share a belief that rural places are not problems to be solved but worlds to be taken seriously. What we build together is founded in trust, generosity, and a willingness to sit with the uncertainty of making something genuinely new.
Collaboration here means more than shared projects. It means long-term relationships, honest exchange, and the kind of creative confidence that comes from working alongside people who bring different knowledge, different roots, and different ways of seeing.
