“No place: art profits to a common fund”

“No Place is a more effective way of following the model of the fair. It is not a project created to go against the idea that is still inscribed and celebrated, but it is a new way of reproducing that format.”

“At fairs, people spend very little time on the work. They forget that the piece is part of a work and that the work has a background that takes time. (…) No Place has days that are similar to those of an exhibition space. In addition, the artists that each gallery brings have different origins and deeply dissimilar worldviews, which is wonderful.”

The plane lands and time is short. Carlos Hurtado, director of Nueveochenta, gets off and carries the drill in one hand and the required paperwork in the other to get to the space where the works will be mounted. The stand must also be ready and the delivery of the pieces coordinated. Not a minute can be wasted. The explanation and the tour of the works will have to be quick so that the planned schedule can be completed and, of course, the attendees will not want to miss anything, so they will also enter a race against time in which the experience with art will be fleeting.

After a hectic day of breakfasts, lunches, openings, discussions and cocktails that filled the agenda, gallery owners, collectors and artists meet for dinner and, finally, a calm glass of wine.

They meet from different countries every three or four months at fairs, but at the end of the day they want to share and talk about art from the slow and pleasant corner of their work. In the informality of the meeting, colleagues give free rein in conversations to their passion for what they do, and that includes questions to move forward: how to optimize the efforts made on internationalization platforms? In addition to the onerous economic efforts, how to make the sacrifices of time and logistics bear more powerful fruits? Everything invisible that is behind a foreign exhibition is admirable. Tickets, insurance, transport, installations, the production of the artists, customs operations and what the absence from one's own gallery implies are efforts that are painfully ephemeral.

So, after many meals and over bottles and bottles of wine, discussing the same subject, four galleries, two from America and two from Europe, stopped dreaming and started acting. They put aside their distant desires and started making serious plans. Nueveochenta, a gallery from Bogotá, started a project called No Place, together with three others: the N/F gallery from Madrid; Arróniz from Mexico; and Michael Sturm from Stuttgart. Between dinners, hugs, and laughs, they concluded that they had to stop with the idea that careers in art were individual. They created a collaborative model that consists of traveling to a city where an event related to art is taking place, taking over a space, doing a joint exhibition around a common objective or a thematic axis, and making it possible by sharing all the expenses associated with that exhibition.

Everything is co-financed by the four galleries, from travel to the city to the profits generated by the exhibition, and this is what is truly novel about this new way of exhibiting contemporary art. The income goes into a common fund, regardless of whether the artist who generated the most profits was brought in by the Colombian or the German gallery. The databases and contacts that result from these meetings are also directed to a common document, to avoid continuing to foster the jealousy over information that is now latent in the industry.

Nueveochenta, the Bogotá gallery, opened eleven years ago in similar conditions to No Place. None of the three partners was very clear about whether opening a space that addressed the urgent needs of art would contribute anything to the struggle that the industry was waging to promote artists and bring the public closer. Carlos Hurtado, its director, is an industrial engineer and was dedicated to investments and public finances. His contact with art came when he began to attend workshops and then galleries: “I heard the story, I was very interested in what they were working on and without any kind of consideration I looked and said: 'That's the piece I like, how much is it worth?'. They told me the price and I did the math with the allowance of a perfectly standard child and said: 'Can I pay you for it in four years with monthly installments?'”

“That seemed very strange to them and I became close to the artists,” says Hurtado, adding that Nueveochenta was born from remembering that type of experience, from the need to not only serve artists with purchasing power, but to connect with all of them and take care of their representation in an organic way.

Nueveochenta opened its doors with emerging talents and its initial philosophy remains the same. The gallery has always been more attentive to the public it does not yet have. It currently represents 21 artists, most of whom are Colombian.

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No Place is a more effective model for the fair. It is not a project created to go against the idea that is still being celebrated and subscribed to, but it is a new way of reproducing that format. At fairs, people spend little time on the work. They forget that the piece is part of a work and that the work has a background that has been there for a long time. It is the discourse, the feelings and the knowledge of each artist that are reflected there, and only with time and a journey that allows the spectator to go deeper is it possible to access the artist's message. Everything moves at a dizzying pace. No Place has days that resemble those of an exhibition space. In addition, the artists that each gallery brings have different origins and profoundly dissimilar worldviews, which is wonderful. The thematic axis makes them meet, but the journeys of their lives make their productions confront each other. The network that is being woven with this project is collaborative and useful. Two versions have been developed so far, the first in Lima (2017) and the second in Berlin (2018). In both cities, collectors, curators and artists have become ambassadors of the project.

The standard format of the fair lasts around three or four days, the two versions of No Place have been extended to almost three weeks, meaning that the city does not stop vibrating with the launch, but can also dedicate itself to floating between the works. This year, the third version is taking place in Guadalajara.

The project, which has managed to boost the agendas of each participating gallery, made these four friends rethink the way they were doing their work. It reminded them why and what they dedicated their lives to art and gave them back their hope in a powerful industry capable of transforming societies.

By: Laura Camila Arévalo Domínguez