The Era 07 project is an initiative of the Mayor of Montevideo, Dr Ricardo Ehrlich, and of the Department of Culture of the Municipality. The Director of the Blanes Museum is in charge of the curatorial design and general coordination, together with the active participation of the Asociación Amigos del Museo Blanes in the production and logistics support, as well as of the authorities, officials and curators of the Department of Culture, who participate in the production, execution and follow-up activities.

The project is structured on the idea of contributing to generate active links between people who work in the areas of artistic creativity and thinking, and those who develop knowledge on the basis of research in social sciences, anthropology and political sciences. For this reason, the selected central theme for all interventions by artists and analysts will revolve around the contemporary crisis of the concept of 'region'. The border policies, the multicultural dynamism created by migration and the stigma - oftentimes - of risk, of clandestinity, and the rupture and pervading effect of urban life on the public and private spheres, the subtle forms of cultural colonialism in the framework of an economically globalised world and, finally, the crisis of place suffered by subjects in this context, are some of the factors that will be approached through the view of contemporary art, in a dialogue with the view of XIXth Century "regionalist art". In addition to this, an interdisciplinary perspective will be covered in the conferences, art clinics and the academic panels.

To this effect, in addition to the Uruguayan artists, curators and scholars who work in social sciences, we have convened two foreign curators, more than twenty-five artists from various parts of the world, twenty foreign analysts who will be integrating panels with Uruguayan specialists, and a hundred iconographic pieces (paintings, engravings, allegories, photographs) of the 19th Century, which belong to the history of federal imagined communities of the Southern Cone (1815 and 1865).

All these events will be held in various parts of the city. The works will not only be exhibited in closed spaces - specially prepared for this purpose - but also in urban spaces as a site for the interventions of contemporary artists.

The idea is to create a continuous event from August 9 through to September 30, 2007, marked by an essentially binding and polemical character.