From Monday 24 October, the exhibition hall of the Auditorium will be occupied by the working groups of the Utopias project with activities open to the public that will be publicised through the networks and the website. The exhibition, the result of this work, will be inaugurated on 22 November.

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Utopicas. Art and Territory is an experimental project, promoted by the Auditorio de Galicia and designed and coordinated by 7H Cooperativa Cultural, which claims culture as a relational process in which all people have the capacity for expression and creative agency and, therefore, defends it as a means of fostering community ties and creating spaces for emancipatory dialogue.

With this conviction and following the format of the citizen innovation laboratories, Utopicas places the Santiago neighbourhood at the centre of artistic production, dissolving the concept of individual authorship, rediscovering the cultural institution as a place of participation, thought and collective action and prioritising the learning from the process over the results.

Its starting point is in March 2022, when an open call was launched inviting the city's inhabitants to submit ideas that had reflected artistically on the concept of territory, understood as material and symbolic space.

After receiving 30 applications, five proposals linked to Compostela from the perspective of identities, feminisms, collective memory and social struggle were chosen. Afterwards, a new call for proposals was opened, which allowed the teams in charge of materialising the ideas into concrete artistic realities to be formed through the participation of interested citizens.

The resulting collectives, constituted as Corpos en resistencia, Libros que fan barrio, Na procura dun bosque, Percorrendo a memoria and Rúas da memoria, worked between June and October to collaboratively design and execute their initiatives. In this process, its members assumed the triple role of creators, curators and agents, breaking with the exclusive creator (professional artist) - receiver (citizen) scheme, and developed various research and creation actions that broadened the frameworks of the community involved in the project.

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