Transition Territories
The VI edition of Glocal Camp was intended to be an itinerant event that, connecting the city center of Madrid and the suburban and peripheral area of the French Pyrenees in Ariège, would allow us to register, highlight and connect the different complexities of the territory and the communities that inhabit it.
The pandemic situation, in addition to the funding difficulties that the organizing team has encountered during the last year, led us to rethink the format of the event, finally deciding to hold an online event.
Even so, we believed that the main topic of the event ” Transition Territories” was even more relevant than ever, precisely because of the uncertainty and the health crisis experienced globally, in total connection with the dynamics of the relationship with the territories we inhabit.
That is why one of the objectives for this online event continues to be to share, register and make visible these fragmentations and continuities in the territory, generating a framework of integral reflection around the very idea of “Territory”.
The different formats of the program are articulated on the basis of two major groups of reflection:
New imaginary countryside-city.
The collective vision defines the city as the center of financial accumulation and consumption, as well as the generator of knowledge and the countryside and the periphery as server spaces of material production. What forms of knowledge generation and transfer currently exist in the countryside? Can cities be reconverted into spaces for production and self-sufficiency? Can the peripheries establish networks that overflow the traditional channels of product/knowledge transfer?
Decentralization of culture, knowledge, and power
Today, culture, understood exclusively as a consumer good, is relegated to large urban centers. On other occasions, when we seek to intervene in peripheral or rural areas through “art” or “culture”, we fall into welfare dynamics that are far removed from the supposed initial objectives of “empowerment”. Is it possible to value local culture without falling into the dynamics of capitalization of this value? Have we conceptualized the peripheries as a professional niche for “citizen participation” and “cultural mediation”? Is it possible to generate a global and connected movement of decentralized cooperation between urban and rural areas? Could this new reality mitigate the material and social costs in an emergency situation like the one we are experiencing?