With the aim of rethinking the ways in which young people inhabit rural territories, the project contemplated using, from a reflective, socio-political and economic perspective, culture and artistic expression as tools for dialogue, exchanges and the collective construction of new narratives. Questioning the past, present, future of the rural area and its relationship with the "urban epicentres" of a world in transition, the aim was to achieve the following objectives: 1. Empower rural youth and encourage their active participation. 2. Make visible the participative experiences of social transformation developed from the rural territories to increase their consideration in public policies. 3. Provide feedback on the proposals to balance territories and combat depopulation. This project was also born from the cooperation, initiated in 2019, between two entities that have been promoting participatory and innovative initiatives for social transformation in the rural world. Thus, another of the project's objectives was the consolidation of this institutional collaboration, the exchanges between processes and the feedback of our reflections, from rurality, youth and interculturality.
In recent decades, the rural world has been abandoned, a situation largely explained by a land-use planning model based on verticality, centralisation and globalisation of the economy and decision-making mechanisms. Predominant culture and associated discourses built an imaginary where urban epicentres rhymed with future, opportunities and progress, and rural peripheries with past, backwardness and immobilism, being the consequences, at local level, of this development model the following: youth exodus, ageing population and lack of generational replacement, loss of basic services and job opportunities, increase of environmental problems, growing feeling of being "second class citizens", which represents a fertile ground for radical ideological positions. Therefore, the fight against depopulation, particularly of young people, requires the creation of alternative and positive narratives about the rural world and its transformative capacity to move towards a sustainable society. From our organisations, we are convinced that youth participation through art represents a fundamental starting point to initiate the process of transformation and valorisation of the identity of the territory that the rural world needs to be reborn.