As part of promoting the El Canal project, the Salt City Council will rehabilitate the house bequeathed by the artist Marta Font as accommodation for the artists who do residencies at the Center for the Creation of Performing Arts.
This year, work will be done on the second floor to create a 132 m2 home that will allow a dozen artists who are in creative residency at El Canal to stay at the same time.
This year 2024, Salt City Council will carry out the first intervention in the house bequeathed in 2012 by Saltan artist Marta Font, with the intention of turning part of this property into a large home where artists or companies can stay who live in El Canal de Salt.
The director of El Canal, Xavier Díaz, points out that the project “makes it possible to combine the cultural destiny of this property with one of the objectives set out in the management plan of El Canal, such as being able to offer accommodation space for artists as another service to professionals, collectives and companies that develop creative projects at the performing arts center”. It is expected that the work will be carried out throughout this 2024, a fact that according to Díaz “will allow the artists’ stays to be more complete by promoting coexistence between diverse artists and making it easier for national and international talent to stay in our municipality getting to know and linking more with social and cultural agents and linking more with the territory of Salt, Girona and the Girona counties”. With this aim, the new space resulting from the rehabilitation will be accommodation with shared common spaces to encourage the interrelationship between resident artists. The usual stays at El Canal are usually between 1 week and one month and during 2024 it is expected that around fifty companies will come to the Center for the Creation of Performing Arts-El Canal.
The multifaceted artist bequeathed her entire art collection and her private house in Plaça Jacint Verdaguer, in the heart of Barri Vell de Salt, to the Salta council with the only condition that the fate of the family home was a cultural use Now the City Council of Salt, in the context of promoting the Center for the Creation of Performing Arts project, wants to initiate that desire expressed by Font in his inheritance and this year plans to take action in the reform of the second floor of the house, as well as access to homes. It is an investment of around 185,000 euros that must be used to join the two floors that were on this upper floor to turn it into a single spacious home of 132.58 square meters that will have the capacity to accommodate ten artists who are doing an artistic residency at the Center for the Creation of Performing Arts – El Canal.
The cost of this first performance at the Marta Font house has been financed by the Diputació de Girona, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Salt City Council itself, with a contribution of 44,740 euros. The rehabilitation of the first floor is left for a second phase and work continues on the cultural destination that can be given to the ground floor of the building in the future to comply with the designs expressed by the artist.
“With this first project, we are beginning to make the wish expressed by Marta Font a reality and we are taking a step so that this family building, now municipal, will in the near future be given a cultural role that will act as a bridge between the first-rate cultural facilities that building the municipality as is the Center for Performing Arts-El Canal itself”, explains the mayor of Salt, Jordi Viñas.
Marta Font, Award March 3, 1995
Marta Font i Soler-Matas was born in Girona in 1938, but family upheavals brought her to Salt when she was still a young child. In 1945 she entered the College of Teresianes in Barcelona to take his basic studies there and studied the upper baccalaureate at the Institut Maragall in the same city. From 1958 until 1964, she attended as a student at the Municipal School of Fine Arts in Girona. In 1958, at the age of 20, she was admitted to the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona where she specialized in painting in 1965.
On returning to Salt he decided to set up an art and craft school in a small workshop in her home. In her workshop he taught plastic arts, but her interest in crafts led him to specialize in multiple craft techniques such as macramé, sgraffito with linoleum, basketry and Japanese lacquer, among others.
Marta Font combined her work as a teacher with that of an artist. She continued to paint with different pictorial techniques such as watercolour, oil, pastel, dry point, tempera, pencil and sanguine. The most recurring themes in his works are the landscape, the figure, still lifes and portraits. She liked to go outside to paint and it was common to see her on the streets of Salt, Girona or in the Deveses area.
Of her relationship with young artists from Salt, in 1969 the initiative arose to form a group of local artists, ELS 13 ESCU-PINT, who participated in a collective exhibition in the municipal exhibition hall of the municipal library of Salt during the Festa Major in 1969 and in 1972 in the exhibition hall of the parish of Sant Jaume.
Her involvement with the town of Salt at a social and artistic level led the City Council to grant him the highest municipal award in 1995, the ‘March 3rd’ award, in recognition of his selfless work in the town.
