By WAC | 2 SEP 2022

Perhaps there is no causal link between the real estate market and the production of art on an urban scale. In fact, this is not the case. It would be easy, however, to gather examples that point to the existence of a correlation between the commercial logic of the former and the artistic practice that defends another skin for our cities. DosJotas is interested in investigating this.

Urban Monopoly thus proposes both a divertimento and an experiment to shed light on the relations between urban art and the commercial impulse that underlies the private initiative whose object is the real estate park. On the one hand, the playful aspect of his proposal —always present in the work of this artist— is evident; on the other hand, he makes the capital-property-profit movement his own, with the ultimate aim of devising and implementing an artistic device in Swinton Gallery.

DosJotas'project relates artistic actions in the public space —in an independent and even illegal way— with the commercial routines of the art market and the bullying and selling of houses and other property, creating a parallelism between urban art and real estate speculation.

The installation will recreate the walls of a contemporary city plagued with signatures, stencils, posters, stickers; simulating those semi-abandoned spaces where there is practically no space left unpainted or untouched.

Urban Monopoly comprises four phases:

• The first consists of an installation covering all the walls of the gallery, from floor to ceiling, with wooden planks. This added surface will form the false walls where the artists will intervene. A plan of the gallery walls will be generated, delimiting spaces of 50x50 cm. This plan will give rise to the first phase of marketing; it will be sent via email, posted on social networks... putting the works not yet executed up for sale; in other words, each 50x50 cm space will be sold off plan for €75 on condition that we do not know what is going to happen in that space.

• The second one begins on the opening day (16 September 2022) when the project is presented in the gallery. On that day all the walls will be intervened by Dosjotas, the 50x50cm spaces will go from 75€ to 150€ only on that day and the list of artists who will intervene on that first layer of Dosjotas will be announced.

• The third one (16 September - 22 October), after the inauguration and for several weeks the invited artists will intervene on the already painted surface, with total freedom, adding the value of their work to the surface in relation to the market price of each one of them, the price of the 50x50cm will depend on each artist and the price they want to give it, always more than 300€. The artists will not know which spaces have been previously sold when they are about to intervene. They will be able to choose the surface they want to paint freely, always within the square metres that will be distributed equally among all the participating artists.

• And the fourth one (29 October - 5 November, closing day), once all the artists have intervened, the final result of the installation will be shown with the sold surfaces removed, i.e. the empty spaces left by the parts that have become private property will be visible.

Buyers who purchased the works in the first phase at €75 or in the second phase at €300 will keep that price regardless of the artist who has intervened subsequently, and may even resell the space for whatever value they see fit. Throughout the exhibition, the works absorb and extend the space within and around themselves into strange territories, transforming the rooms into places for the magical, beyond a mere exhibition of objects.

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