house was always full of local artists. She has a coalescing personality and is also very articulate, always trying to improve working conditions for herself as well as others. When I graduated the environment was different and her generation was more dispersed. My colleagues either went to São Paulo or ended up working with something else, like design for example. The market was absorbing all the artists, but it wasn’t the art market because at the time we didn’t have that system in Belo Horizonte yet. Many, like me, also left the country. When was that? Between 2001 and 2002. For me it was very important to see those collective spaces in Barcelona and New York. In Barcelona there was Hangar, for example. Places with a library, room for workshops, for sharing information and knowledge, to do an internship, to have a studio, get a scholarship. They were places centered around studying but not through formal ways. You would raise questions and people were willing to help, integrating different generations. In New York there were many places, some were 30, 50 years old! Already traditional places. Yes, decades old and still very autonomous. Places that were never incorporated by institutions but that had a permanent life. I think here continuity is always a challenge. It takes a lot of energy to keep a place open, it becomes attached to the people that first opened it and you have to create a very solid structure so that it can survive possible shifts in its direction. In New York things are not less precarious, both for institutions and for artists. Nowadays the life of an emerging artist in New York is more precarious than it is here in Brazil. Really?! Really. But that was not a big problem, at least not in the community I was a part of. Very few people lived off their artistic work, even though they never stopped trying to make things happen. Nobody hides their “parallel” lives either, the one that pays rent - being a designer, teacher, waiter, whatever. There’s a support network and you can make a lot happen through exchanges - I will make your website and you can lend me your space. There are platforms to facilitate these exchanges. Here we are stuck with using money, because we have financing. It’s great that we have financing, but when you stop having it, you stop working altogether. In the United States they can’t even conceive just being handed fifty thousand dollars. You can count all the financing opportunities in the country and the artists that get them. Then here in Brazil how much is Funarte giving away in a year? In that sense things are more difficult there; people write very long applications to get a thousand dollars. We are living through a time when we fail to recognize how fortuitous financing is. When I would tell people in the United States that I have friends that got a million to make a movie they were shocked! When JA.CA started out we had a lot of money from the Incentive Law, and we never had the same sort of financing again - we started doing a lot more with just one-third of the money. It was important to spend a year without any financing, I learned a lot and had to come up with different strategies to use our space, which we were renting. Actually, JA.CA is always forcing me to learn new things. We are very interested in learning how to drive down the costs we have, which are very high, and how to be able to support ourselves through other ways instead of relying solely on financing and grants. The choices to be as autonomous as possible are constant and sometimes you have to be less independent and autonomous to be able to have money. Would you say the biggest challenge for JA.CA is to have that sort of continuity? We don’t have the same fears we had during the first years, that constant threat of closing down. I think we are past that, because no matter what happens we will stay open. Since last year we started doing exercises in mobility and did a lot outside our own offices, and in 2014 we will have a lot of space for a residence project in the center of Belo Horizonte in partnership with Palácio das Artes. But at first, with the financial situation so unstable, we were constantly worried. For every month in 2011, when we had no funding, Xandro (another founding member) and I paid for everything to keep JA.CA open. That was a very difficult year as I had just returned to the city a year before and had no connections at the time. I had never had an exhibition here, had never worked on any projects here. I slowly began to meet people and insert myself in the local scene.
180 | A palavra está com elas