TERRITORIES IN PROCESS

The IDENSITAT 07 programme will be developed along the year 2007 in three urban centres which have different characteristics: on the one hand, Calaf, an industrial and rural context which has a population of 3,500 inhabitants; on the other hand Manresa, a medium city having about 74,000 inhabitants and which has a complex associative network, engine of different social and cultural activities. These two towns are close one to each other and are placed in the centre of Catalonia, being separated by a distance of twenty-three kilometres. In this edition we also find the participation of ‘Can Xalant, Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani' in Mataró. Thus, this city of 170,000 inhabitants and places at twenty-nine kilometres of distance from Barcelona is incorporated to the programme, drawing a line that goes from inland towards the coastal context.

Today the three towns experiment an important expansion triggered by new roads, the change of site for certain economic activities and the redesign of new ones, the abundance of industrial centres, the constant social reorganisation together with the continuous migrations, the demand of new housing with the consequent transformation and urbanisation of the territory. All this impulses a new social and cultural map that is emerging right now and is constantly being redefined, thus conditioning with this chain of changes the role that the towns of Calaf, Manresa and Mataró play in a territorial level, being as they are, close to the metropolitan area of Barcelona.

From this perspective IDENSITAT 07 is formulated as an observatory of the territory and a laboratory for project development, offering the opportunity of intervening in an active way in urban processes when there is a phenomenon of expansion and growth, together with a redefinition of the identities that characterise them. This transformation of the territory takes place simultaneously in different towns. This is a way of allowing the existence of an action, experimentation and debate fields, which were already created in the previous edition of the programme [IDENSITAT 05]. The intense urban evolution experimented now in Calaf, Manresa or Mataró should be taken into account to articulate the dynamics of an artistic activity which includes critical, analytic or propositional regards involving determined layers of population; or which at the same time permit the formulation of alternatives to perceive, face and share certain specific urban processes taking place in a given time.