La gran experiencia. La comuna de Otto Muehl en La Gomera (The great experience. The commune of Otto Muehl in La Gomera)

The artist of Viennese Actionism, Otto Muehl, founded in 1970 a commune with the intention of merging art and life. The project was exceptionally developed, and it grew to over five hundred members, making it one of the largest counter-cultural communities in the 20th century Europe. At the beginning of the 1980s, the group lightened its social-revolutionary ideology and moved from an economy based on rural collectivism to one based on financial speculation. The discipline of programmed work ended up bringing a contradiction between its high profitability and the hedonistic and collectivist principles that had been the foundation of the commune. In an attempt to recover their initial spirit, they decided to invest in a new headquarters dedicated to artistic and leisure activities and integrated into nature. In 1987 they acquired a large, isolated and abandoned farm that was once one of the main agricultural operations on La Gomera: El Cabrito. The enclave that the comuneros had chosen as their holiday centre now became a tourist resort after the dissolution of the group in 1990. The Canarian period of the commune constitutes the final scenario where those emancipatory utopias of the sixties, fed by the great myths of modernity, will be surpassed by their own internal contradictions to end up deriving, with total naturalness, in a predictable tourist utopia.