what's next...
It’s been a while since I have been thinking and re-thinking about what we do, how we do it and why we do it. Who could tell, when we prepared our booth for this year’s ZonaMACO -a booth behind closed doors with limited access to the general public- that we were pre-figuring the loneliness and emptiness that we are living in these days of Coronavirus. In that experiment, we stumbled upon an interesting find: every time we went into the booth with someone and closed the door behind us a vacuum was created, much like the sensation you get when you walk inside a Joseph Beuys felt room.
The absence of all the noise and distraction from the fair was pretty evident, we suddenly had the attention of anyone who happened to be in the room with us. This gave us the unexpected chance of telling the stories behind the works on show, their histories, the ways in which they related to each other. We had the best conversations with all kinds of people. Of course that kind of isolation is a far cry from what we are now living. It is true though, that at least for the kind of artists that we work with, and the kind of work they make, the gallery show is the best possible context. In this sense Zona MACO’s experiment was clear enough, we had transferred the gallery into the fair thus building a kind of oasis in the midst of all the mayhem.
A few weeks after that we had to make the decision of changing, not only our location, but also and more profoundly our gallery model. With the epidemic breathing down our necks we made a move that took its toll in economic, energetic and emotional terms. But now that I have been on lockdown for more than two weeks i am totally convinced that we are on the right path, and that this change couldn’t have come at a better time.
Sadly it will be a while before the sanitary situation will allow us to actually welcome you in our new space, but we are using this time to prepare for that moment. At the same time I am discovering everything I don’t know about digital media…I am also understanding my own reticence in relying too much on new technologies. I am old-school you see? I believe in the power of objects, in the physical presence of people and things, and most specifically of artworks, as vehicles of sensory and intellectual connection. After giving it much thought and in that same spirit, i am testing the different possibilities that available technology gives us to stay connected, to keep working and building a platform for our artists, and to understand our practice as a gallery from a wider perspective: as archivists, translators, curators, informers and event-planners. And of course to re-imagine just how we can keep at doing all these things.
I invite you to explore our website. We are uploading very diverse content with the idea of recovering artworks from the depths of our storage, looking deeper into our artists’ diverse practices and experimenting with and taking advantage of our digital platforms in a more conscious, coherent and solid way. Please reach out to tell us what you like and what you don’t, ask anything and let us know whatever comes to your mind, it’s all about keeping in touch and profiting of this time to re-open the conversation.
Never has art been so necessary to make us think, to make us share and to help us understand.
*image: Ignasi Aballi, vacío-aire, 2017, collage (diptico), 21 x 29.7 cm c/u