This initiative, part of the 'Cafè-Debat a la fresca' (Open-Air Coffee Debate) project, uses images from the past as a common thread to reconnect neighbours, identify locations, and discover what life was like in the municipality years ago. The goal is to create a living, shared photographic archive, built with citizen contributions to preserve intangible heritage for future generations.
The project facilitates participation in various ways. Residents can photograph or select old images from their mobile phones, add information about the people, places, and dates, and send them for review. For paper-only photographs, the council will digitize them and return them to their owners. The initiative aims to strengthen the sense of belonging to the municipality, highlighting the shared history of Rubió and Maçana, and giving a leading role to the elderly as transmitters of local memory.
The project's calendar includes several activities in the coming months. On October 18th, a memory workshop will be held during the Seniors' Lunch. On October 20th, the digital gallery will open, and in November, there will be further meetings and home visits. By the end of the year, a documentary is planned with the collected photographs and testimonies.
The City Council encourages all residents to participate: 'We want this to be a project built by everyone, because behind every photograph there are people, places, moments, and stories that are part of our collective memory. We encourage everyone to look through family albums, retrieve old photographs, and help us identify the people and places that appear in them. The history of Rubió and Maçana is also the history of each of its residents, and we want to preserve it for future generations.'
The 'Rubió and Maçana, One Memory' project is funded by the Diputació de Barcelona and executed by Media Cataldi. Interested individuals can participate via the website arxiurubio.cat.
