Habita et Labora. Industrial housing estates in Catalonia is a temporary exhibition created in 2008 by the Museu de la Ciència i de la Tècnica de Catalunya (mNACTEC)  (Science and Technology Museum of Catalonia) to provide a different and particular view of the Catalan industrial housing estates of the Llobregat and Ter rivers through the eyes of the photographer Lluís Casals.

The exhibition, which has already travelled around a number of museums of the mNACTEC Territorial System and the Rheinisches Industriemuseum in the Rhineland, the product of the cooperation between those two entities in their respective countries and the desire to dignify and conserve the industrial heritage. It will be travelling to the Catalan Government (Generalitat de Catalunya) delegation to the European Union in Brussels in June. The journey is timed to coincide with the opening of a new space in the building designed to house temporary exhibitions which help to publicise and promote Catalan culture. Our exhibition will have the good fortune to be the first event held there.

We at the mNACTEC wanted to take this chance to relocate the context of the exhibition and, from its Catalan origin, endow it with a more European dimension. We should bear in mind that despite the peculiarities of the Catalan model, other countries of the European Union lived, in their own way, the phenomenon of industrialisation and the appearance of industrial housing estates. The Bergslagen mines of Sweden, the ceramic and glass industries of Nuevo Baztán near Madrid, or the garden cities of Valdagno in Italy or Agneta Park in the Czech Republic: these are just some examples of a phenomenon that has an international dimension that is worth emphasising.

The exhibition consists of sixty photographs of industrial housing estates located on a map of the river basins and arranged in groups. Two photographs per sphere and a series of original objects put the visitors in touch with the current state of these places –not too well known these days– and the way things were when they were in use through six fundamental spheres: landscape, the owner’s house, energy, industrial architecture, the workers’ housing and life on the estate. This photographic exhibition will show how Catalonia was one of the first zones of the Mediterranean to be industrialised and was a pioneer in Spain.