The Green Parrot is a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to accompany and exhibit the work of visual artists. It has gone through several phases: in its beginnings, with headquarters to exhibit its proposals; then as a resident project at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (a habitat that allowed them to exhibit and articulate a public programme in the city or in the rooms of the institution itself); and now with a new space again; always in the city of Barcelona.

On next 23 September it opens The Awakening, by Antoni Hervàs, whose project begins in the Tom of Finland archive in Los Angeles. Through drawings, he will explain some relevant stories or moments that took place in the 1980s, a period in which censorship prevented the publication of erotic gay novels outside the underground scene or dissident culture.  

The following is the result of a conversation with its director, the curator Rosa Lleó, on the occasion of the start of the art gallery season in Barcelona.

I

ALBERTO AGUILAR: Today it is a fact that the audience experience in art galleries or museums is in question. So let us start from that. With regard to your initiative, it seems to us that one of the programmatic focus of The Green Parrot is to rethink the model that accomodates both dialogue and exhibition. If so, how do you articulate an informal space in the contemporary art sphere and proceed carefully to achieve an intimate relationship with the audience?

ROSA LLEÓ: I would like to start by saying that in 2014, when we founded The Green Parrot, there was a lack of spaces that represented artists who did not have access to museums and galleries in Barcelona. The idea was to be a space or a non-profit organisation. With a solid, constant, annual programme, focused on the local sphere, on the context. We are always on the lookout to know what is happening and what is needed, to understand our place in the ecosystem of culture. We are not interested in being an alternative but in understanding what is needed.

That is why I have never seen myself as an informal space but as a para-institution where projects are articulated. What differentiates us from a standard gallery - apart from the objective, which is not commercial - is that from the beginning we accompany the artists projects, by going deeper into each of them because we are not subject to the “rhythm” of the art market. I also think that our organisation, or our space, does not want to be completely defined. It is fine to remain in a fluid stage: a gallery, workshops, conversations, whatever we conceive.

Regarding the audience, museums and galleries have realised that proximity or attention to people is essential. For example, the next annual conference of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) is entitled The Attentive Museum. Permeable Practices for a Common Ground; that is, how to listen to audiences, how to approach them and how to be part of a dialogue with them. The small-scale organisations have done this from the beginning, it is part of our nature. We have maintained this spirit eight years later. Now we also see our space as a place to be inhabited: residencies, talks with a capacity of fifteen or twenty people -it is the ideal to generate a dialogue-, to get out of the artistic community.

II

AA: It is through research and experimentation that the real is understood and penetrated. Why is it appropriate to maintain that artistic research extends the limits of our knowledge? In your case: What reality or realities are you interested in? What research frameworks are present and deployed in your exhibition projects or activities?

RLL: More than conceptual, almost all our projects have a narrative character. We want them to tell us a story, a story that has to do with something that is relevant to what we are living in our days. To give you an example, the exhibition by Adrian Schidler and Eulàlia Rovira (The Plague, The Profit) is an artistic investigation, a project that provides a different vision to an episode in the history of Colonialism: the cochineal trade, the Spanish Crown later produced carmine from the cochineal beetle, and which has to do with Baroque painting and the greatness of that period. But it is a product that actually comes from the Aztecs: it is the Mexican red. On the other hand, with the independence of Mexico, cochineal was cultivated in the Canary Islands for two centuries. Seeing that it was a story that came from various places, we wanted to “land” it in those places: we had contact with the Tenerife organisation Solar Acción Cultural; as for Mexico, we chose curators or thinkers who had a certain interest in these subjects: we spoke with Catalina Lozano (she is very interested with the relation between art and anthropology and ethnology) and with Paulina Ascencio, who carried out a virtual residency with us, a series of tutorials and held conversations with the artists so that the project would grow in the towns that originated this substance. As you can see, multiple relationships with characters that deal with the history of art, commerce, even food (cochineal is now a food colouring). The artists thus offer a different perspective.

III

AA: The construction of a critique responds to a positioning. Because although we can occupy multiple positions from which to contemplate or study an object, this is always the same. What are your premises, what is the conceptual apparatus that you articulate within The Green Parrot to create a critical discourse from art and culture?

RLL: It is from the artists. We delve into the work of an artist and we extract the concepts that seem interesting or critical to us. We never handle a series of concepts beforehand and we place them in their proposals. For me, this is fundamental and it is not something that always happens. Listening to them, to what they have to say, and giving them a way of expressing it, or a theoretical framework that is often there, but they do not know how to articulate it. It is important to anchor the contemporary issues in what one does. At The Green Parrot we work on the basis of critical thinking, of challenging hegemonic ways of understanding society. Artists always do this: they try to turn it around, to look at a specific episode that is forgotten or unexplained, or to look for the interstices of history, episodes or events.

IV

AA: If we conceive the gallery or the exhibition project as a space of knowledge and learning -and we should call it- horizontal, the role of the different actors involved is redefined. That is to say: the artist and the curator play the role of those who initiate "something"; the public is, in turn, an active collaborator in the learning process (discovery-experience-understanding). Could you characterise the relational dimension that you foster with artists or other professionals?

RLL: In fact, lately I've been having doubts about whether the exhibition format is viable for us. This coming year we are going to collaborate with Eina Idea, with a museum in Barcelona (to be confirmed). And we are thinking more about the idea of process; later we can formalise it in an exhibition or not. We are more interested in having that moment of horizontal work with the artist —that you allude to— and enjoying it: build dynamics with other people, generating that process, because what is formalised is not so important. 

How you deal with audiences is the difficult part. At The Green Parrot we have reached a certain point and the idea is to look for other collaborating agents who can expand it. To be a space for knowledge and learning, we need to have a university as an accomplice, other organisations that can add to achieve a greater impact, something we are increasingly concerned about. If you work on a non-profit basis, you have to give something back to society, because we also receive public funding and we have a duty to provide a public service to citizens. We have to think about how we do it so that it really becomes visible and also involve all the audiences that come to our space.

We now know that collaboration is crucial for us. We have to revisit more the models of social organisations or collectives to think about a horizontal learning scenario. That of the feminist organisations of the 70s, for example: how they worked and why they were really close to the people. As I said before, museums are also discussing how to do it. That is why now many of them are looking at smaller scale organisations that work in other parts of the world and that have little to do with the production of exhibitions.

V

AA: It is currently proposed to devise and implement other economies and other ways of proceeding in the complex of contemporary art. In your case you advocate that this should be based on generosity. Another example of this is that we embrace an "economy of love" as opposed to the current economic paradigm in which mercantilist logic unfolds, as Marina Fokidis (curator of what is going to be the central project of ARCOmadrid 2023: the programme "The Mediterranean: A Round Sea") proposes. Could you explain what you are referring to, please?

RLL: It is a very complex issue. We wrote that sentence when we opened The Green Parrot. At a time when southern Europe had suffered a tremendous crisis and we were witnessing the sanctions that the European Union was imposing on the countries of the south: in particular, the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain). It was our specific response against that. We also lived in a social democracy, of course, and we had rather precarious institutions, with excessive political interference. Our initiative arose in that scenario. And thanks to the generosity of all the artists who had decided to exhibit with us. Without having given them a budget for their production, with very low labor fees, we said to them: we will invite you to Barcelona to spend a week, we will put you up, regretfully we will not be able to offer the same treatment you will get in a museum... And they all said yes.

We —in southern Europe— have a real economy that is much more fragile, much more unstable, this does not mean that it is worse, we are simply working with other ways of doing things. Contemporary art is a creation of the Anglo-Saxon context.

Of course, I would like to know how to theorise it better. The artist Regina de Miguel has just recommended the book Descolonizar Europa. Ensayos para pensar históricamente desde el Sur, by Javier García Fernández, in which he talks about the many "souths" that we have in each of our contexts.

From this approach, we are now working in Barcelona with the idea of linking various non-profit spaces to share resources, to come together and think about exhibitions. Other ways of proceeding, there is no other alternative...

AA: At this point, concerning the private initiative we wonder to what business model it is directed. Or in other words, how could it be conceived in the framework of another sort of exchange of goods and ideas: of another kind of dialogue and artistic production. We would like you to address this question to conclude our conversation. It has been a pleasure to talk to you about aspects of your work at The Green Parrot.

RLL: This is precisely what we have had to consider this year in order to be able to survive. It is therefore necessary not to rule out thinking about "forms of business" so that our organisation can be sustainable in the medium term. We would like a hybrid model (public-private): with patronage, companies and public capital (subsidies or grants). But we see it as complicated from Barcelona. We are constantly thinking about it, believe me.

Eight years ago, the team of 1646 Experimental Art Space (Netherlands) talked to us, they visited us to find out how The Green Parrot worked. And now they have an art centre, with a big budget and an impeccable way of working. Another example of this is the organisation Pivô (São Paulo): they have also grown thanks to the American model of management. I always think that if we had been in another context we might have done something similar.

ROSA LLEÓ is an art curator. She is also the founder and director of The Green Parrot, an organisation dedicated to accompanying and exhibiting the work of visual artists since 2014 in the city of Barcelona.

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