Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

MAPA DE MATARÓ is part of a project named EL REVÉS DE LA TRAMA (THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WEFT). This project stemmed from the workshop Derrotas alternativas: Now/here Mataró (Alternative Failures: Now/here Mataró), which took place in Can Xalant, in September-October of 2008. A working group born from that meeting, and formed by Roser Caminal, Ismael Cabezudo, Laura Marte, Cecilia Postiglioni, Daniela Ortiz and Anna Recasens, collaborated with Rogelio Lopez Cuenca in an investigation concerning the demarcation of an "alternative" geography of the city, based on the tracing of itineraries that would allow for a revision of the local history in a way/in ways that will enable to simultaneously report aspects of it which are generally seen as isolated, categorized and frozen in time, enclosed in specific spaces; a cross section based precisely on the non-established geographies of daily life, by connecting them to the global processes of which they are a consequence and the protagonists at the same time.

The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say and this `not said´ is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.

This MAP OF MATARÓ is set to unravel the yarn of History into a series of stories resembling a rhizome; to start off with the network woven by the recurring thread of the textile industry in Mataró and of the issues with which it has been entwined over the years: the crisis in industrial capitalism and the globalization of markets, but also, more particularly, the way in which power and violence directly manifest themselves in people´s bodies and lives – something that takes shape, for example, in the mass

movements of people driven by the demand of manpower, and in the incorporation of women to the salaried labour market and the public life. It is the proposal of a multifaceted and flexible, versatile cartography capable of embracing, and offering an answer to, the multiplicity of perspectives that coexist both in the territory and in its memories.

In Greek tragedy, the stage centre was taken up by the heroes, most of the time, for they were the only ones who had a direct contact with the gods. However, daily life was allocated a subordinate and faceless space: that of the chorus. It was formed by women, children, slaves, old people, beggars, invalids…

The subjects have been delimited, their boundaries defined and an outline established, in order that within this outline the common objectives will not vanish, among constellations of connection and derivation between the different objectives. To this effect, the addition of a gender perspective -a constant issue while, in turn, it was never regarded in accordance with its significance either- has become a mobile and permanent axis of the project.

Just as all things, in a perpetual process of mingling and contamination, are losing their intrinsic character while ambiguity displaces authenticity, so is the city.

Even the format chosen to develop the project, a map, involves the rejection of a linear and authoritarian type of narration: it offers a plane on which to unfold a proposal of multiple readings, of itineraries across the memory of the territory.

At the still point of the turning world.