One hundred years ago, in October 1905, the first "Made in Berlin" trade fair was launched. The City of Kitchener, formerly Berlin, was known for its visionary entrepreneurs and its skilled labour, humming with activity in the trades and crafts and following the promise of industrial wealth. "Ex industria prosperitas" is the motto of the City of Kitchener: from industry comes prosperity. The region of Waterloo, designated by Statistics Canada as Kitchener and Area, is being promoted as Canada's Technology Triangle, and as a global player in many high-tech research and development sectors: communications, automation, semiconductors, nano-technology and quantum computing, to name a few.

For X industria, visual and media artists were invited to consider the industrial past, obsolete and new technologies and the relationship of labour to prosperity, or the lack thereof, in local and global contexts. International and national artists may wish to propose projects addressing economic issues, the shifting roles of governments and corporations; the increasing gap between the first and third world; moral issues of ownership of natural resources (in the traditional sense or the more modern sense, such as human DNA); bio-technology and commerce; cultural identity vs. mass production; and research areas such as nanotechnology or quantum computing.