In the art factory

Barcelona again has the art cen­tre it de­serves. It has been a long jour­ney since the Cen­tre d’Art Santa Mònica changed its sta­tus in 2008, with se­ri­ous con­se­quences for the vis­i­bil­ity of the coun­try’s artists. In 2012, the re­stored Fabra i Coats fac­tory be­came a new home for con­tem­po­rary art, al­though it has al­ways seemed to be more of a sim­u­la­tion of an arts cen­tre, with­out a clearly de­fined role. How­ever, it now seems as if it fi­nally has the lead­er­ship it was so sorely lack­ing. The new head, Joana Hur­tado, is tack­ling the chal­lenge with her own ideas, the same ideas that con­vinced the com­mit­tee that chose her from among the other can­di­dates to run the cen­tre.

It is a com­plex chal­lenge, how­ever, due to the merg­ing of the arts cen­tre with the cre­ation fac­tory housed in the same his­toric build­ing in the city’s Sant An­dreu neigh­bour­hood. De­spite two dis­tinct pro­grammes being forced to­gether, one for res­i­den­cies and one for ex­hi­bi­tions, Hur­tado sees many pos­si­bil­i­ties in a plat­form that rep­re­sents the en­tire cre­ative process, from con­cep­tion to dis­play­ing the final work. “It has to be an­other medium for ex­am­in­ing means of pro­duc­tion and par­tic­i­pa­tion,” she says.

And there is an­other fac­tor that makes Fabra i Coats spe­cial: the site in­cludes a num­ber of so­cial and ed­u­ca­tional in­sti­tu­tions and or­gan­i­sa­tions from the local area, from a nurs­ery to an athenaeum (cul­tural club). Hur­tado has every in­ten­tion of in­volv­ing these or­gan­i­sa­tions in her pro­ject: “It’s a mini-world of dreams,” she says. In short, all of these var­i­ous el­e­ments under one roof pro­vide stim­u­lat­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties for “new and dif­fer­ent ways of mak­ing and ex­pe­ri­enc­ing art, and new and dif­fer­ent ways of being an artis­tic in­sti­tu­tion,” she ar­gues.

Hur­tado has asked for nine months to get her pro­ject going (which fore­sees at least six an­nual ex­hi­bi­tions), but she has al­ready laid out the broad out­lines of her vi­sion, which as­pires to “ar­tic­u­late and be an ac­tive part of the coun­try’s cul­tural ac­tors”. In the new heads’s think­ing are not only artists, but also cu­ra­tors, re­searchers, and pro­gram­mers.

To un­der­stand what the new di­rec­tor is aim­ing for, it is im­por­tant to pay at­ten­tion to the terms she uses. Hur­tado does not see the pub­lic as users who con­sume what­ever is put be­fore them, but rather vis­i­tors and par­tic­i­pants who are in­volved in a joint pro­ject. As a re­sult, the vis­its will not be guided tours but part of a di­a­logue. “We have to stop un­der­stand­ing art as a closed mes­sage that is shown through a neu­tral and mono­lithic re­cip­i­ent, and we have to see our­selves as a place of shared use where con­tent, artist and vis­i­tor are per­me­able,” she says. How­ever, Hur­tado is keen to stress that she has not come to Fabra i Coats to im­pose her own per­sonal brand. Rather, she says she wants to above all “lis­ten”, to break the si­lence sur­round­ing the in­sti­tu­tion’s role that has held sway until now. “Peo­ple mat­ter more to us than things. Cre­ation and artis­tic man­age­ment means tak­ing care not only of the works of art, but the peo­ple that sur­round them and work with them, from the artist to the se­cu­rity guard in the ex­hi­bi­tion room to the pub­lic,” she says.

The cen­tre’s new head also wants to avoid rais­ing walls, like those that al­ready exist in art, such as dis­ci­plines or gen­er­a­tions, and Fabra i Coats has the mis­sion of going be­yond the cir­cuit of emerg­ing spaces (which Hur­tado knows well, as she man­aged the Can Fe­lipa arts cen­tre for 10 years). She also aims for the cen­tre’s pro­jects to em­brace the local, na­tional and in­ter­na­tional (she has in mind some co-pro­duc­tions to en­sure the cen­tre’s ex­hi­bi­tions travel as far as pos­si­ble).

Whether local or global, Hur­tado in­tends to open com­pe­ti­tions for res­i­den­cies, al­low­ing the cho­sen artists to cre­ate in the cen­tre, and even live there, as five apart­ments will soon be pro­vided. Mean­while, there will also be changes in how the cen­tre man­ages artist’s res­i­den­cies, giv­ing pri­or­ity to those pro­jects that aim to be­come rooted in the “mini-world of dreams” and rul­ing out those that could be done in any other place. All of the res­i­den­cies will be of­fered free and will be less per­ma­nent than be­fore: “They will be re­newed up to a limit,” she says.

Hur­tado is tak­ing on the new chal­lenge full of hope and ex­cite­ment, but with re­sources – both human and eco­nomic – that are lim­ited. Some 90% of the €1.6 mil­lion bud­get comes from the Barcelona city coun­cil, with the re­main­ing 10% com­ing from the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment. Of this amount, some €723,000 are for the art cen­tre (La Vir­reina Cen­tre de la Imatge gets €970,000 and La Capella gallery gets €350,000). “It’s not ideal, but we can still do a lot,” she con­cludes.

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