ARCOmadrid 2023 as a souk, a bazaar or an agora of the Mediterranean Sea, in such a way that both the creators who exhibit their work and the public of the fair share knowledge and experiences in solidarity through the artistic practice that unfolds in the countries bathed by the aforementioned sea. We talked to Marina Fokidis, curator of this year's central section.

I

ALBERTO AGUILAR: At least since the founding of Kunsthalle Athena in 2010, you have been reflecting on art institutions. Could you explain to us what the social role of them should be today?

MARINA FOKIDIS: To be honest with you, I don’t think there is a ‘should’ in these situations. I think institutions, mostly public institutions, should be flexible in adapting the changes that are happening right now in our world. Maybe always they were happening, but right now —because of the internet, the digital, living— the changes are faster and sometimes they don’t even register with people’s minds. So, first of all, an institution should be flexible and attentive on understanding on what is going on out and trying to find ways to also benefit the weakest link.

In these sense, I think the Museum Reina Sofía, in Madrid, is an excellent example. For all of us, all over Europe and all over the world, what has happened the last 15 years in this museum is a big lesson. I think it is the most important institution in the world right now, and I hope it is going to continue to be like that. This is also mainly because of the management of the institution. It’s not only the exhibitions that are of this great quality, but it’s also how the institution, in some ways, understood and incorporates in its spine the weakest communities in the different other themes of solidarity. So this is something that is unique in the world, and thank you Museum Reina Sofía, and thank you Spain and Madrid for giving us this example.

With Kunsthalle Athena, it was kind of a pilot institution on how things should be. The idea is always the same: it’s not public. The idea was how an institution should be, something common, like the water. Anyway, a public institution is paid by the taxpayers of everyone. So it’s not how to serve the government in power, the directors, the staff should not be appointed by the Prime Ministers and be under the service of them. It should be transparent, helping everyone that pays for this institution to be, and flexible to how it can serve the society besides showing the works of the collection.

II

AA: How does an artist —or an artists’ collective— participate in global knowledge networks outside the market and the major international events of the art world? How do they manage to transfer the knowledge and experiences that artistic practice builds outside of fairs and biennials, for instance?

MF: First of all, artist collective, artist collective-run spaces like Kunsthalle Athena, should not feel that they are outside. You define if you are inside or outside. Nobody else can define if you are inside or outside. Good examples are Athens Biennale, our Kunsthalle Athena, or SAVVY in Berlin. Let me tell you what happened with these examples. They require a lot of work. A lot of work that you are not getting paid, and this is what happened with Kunsthalle Athena for five years. How did I survive? How did the team survive? We extended because of love for the art and for the people, we extended our working hours to 18-20 per day. So we were working with Kunsthalle Athena the best we could and also having jobs to survive. So this is one, you have to be ready for this.

Second you have to say, the ‘international’, the ‘global’ as you call it is not something that comes from outside. You are part of the international and the global. It depends on from where you look at the rest of the world. So if there is a collective in Seville, for example, the question is not how can I participate in an international biennale, because Seville is international by itself. So this is what we did with Kunsthalle Athena. We said, enough running to convince biennials, big events, because – I have to remind you that this was before Documenta – enough of trying to convince them to be part of it, as Greek artists and Greek curators. We’re going to make something that they would want to come and see from all over the world. And this is what happened. We call it Kunsthalle, which is not a Greek word, but it means something to the international, so we hijack a condition, it’s like calling McDonalds something that sells kebab.

So people come to see what this McDonalds is. Then, we tried to make it as international as possible with our colleagues from all over the world, but not by saying: ‘I’ll come and show you but please come and see what we do’. And so, initiatives as such Kunsthalle Athena and Athens Biennale, all private will, brought documenta 14 in Athens. So, we didn’t go for the world, the world came to us if you want to speak about it this way. This is for me the most important, the Brazilians have a great saying about this. That when you speak about the world, you speak from your feet. From where your feet are standing. So this is, for me, the most important. Don’t look at the global, the art market, all this, as something outside to what you do. You don’t need to be part. They need to be part of your endeavor. And this is how I manage, and this is how Bonaventure Bejeng Ndikung manages with SAVVY, an independent space for many years in Berlin that now has become a big institution. And many other examples like that.

III

AA: It seems clear that our era is characterized by facing a series of challenges: volatility, complexity, uncertainty, among others. Could it be said that your project, The Mediterranean: A Round Sea, proposes a creative relationship with the urgencies —social, ecological, humanitarian, etc.— in the Mediterranean in such a way that it embeds them in a fiction in order to understand them? 

MF:  This would be wonderful if we would have done this but of course we have to understand the restrictions and we try our best, so we didn’t do this. This is an art fair. You have to invite artists. It’s like when they invited me. I have to say my huge impression of Maribel López, the director of ARCO Fair, because she understands the discarded part of art fairs. I’ve been around for 25 years working with the art, and I’ve never before —but never— met an art fair director as such, that could take that risk. Approaching a curator like me that I’m not part of the market in the restrictive sense. I had advisors. I appointed advisors: Pedro G. Romero, Bourchra Khalili, Hila Peleg, artists and curators that are not part of this. So she took a big risk, but still we had to respect that in that section there would be artists that had galleries. And the galleries so, we had to work with this. And so, what we thought is how can we enlarge this gathering by inviting also people that are not part of this gallery situation —not that galleries are bad, because galleries are helping artists survive. For instance, there is an artist, Safaa Erruas, from Tetouan (Morocco), where until she finished her art school, she never managed to go outside Morocco. Now she is an international artist, but with the help, very much, the help of the gallery Dominique Fiat, from France, that could afford to help her do so. So, it’s not always the evil. And this is what we thought.

Let’s think that ARCO is a souk, a bazaar, an agora, in the Mediterranean. But we should not forget that the agora is where Socrates could buy the fish, the meat, the vegetables. It was not something noble on another level. And we also know that here in the Mediterranean, it has seen so many wars. So many conquers. The Arabs, the Spanish, now so many people are even still dying so much. Where back then, historically, people could see their world and meet and speak with each other, was through merchants. That’s how the culture circulated within the Mediterranean Basin.

With that, let’s think of a momentary utopia and say that this is a souk. And so, what do we want in this souk? We want also to bring independent voices, so Bourchra Khalili creates a panel with only artist-run spaces from Morocco, Algeria, Marseille, that is not so common and never done before in an art fair. You never invite the artist-run spaces. Pedro G. Romero has a whole day of flamenco performers and artists, also something that doesn’t happen. But this is something I created as a curator. It’s not by accident. It’s part of this idea of the Mediterranean. We made also a book which you will find in the fair, which is a special theoretical book that shows our positions and people can get it in the fair. And also we tried, with the resources we have, to [spill] a bit in the institutions of outside of ARCO even for people that cannot afford to pay the tickets to come and understand what we are doing in ARCO.

For example, we have a projection in Cineteca of the film Foragers by Jumana Manna. So we worked extra. There’s always a chance that if you work double, even if you are not paid for it, you will create a difference. And also in La Casa Encendida, we have Movement Radio, which is a radio that focuses on Mediterranean by the Onassis Foundation, sponsored by the Onassis Foundation in Athens. They are bringing a Greek film maker and also Bill Kouligas, a very-known Greek performer. This is our way of enlarging our gathering, but also making our work three times more than it should be. But this is how I perceive of active curating. Or activist curating.

Now, how can you change the problems of Mediterranean? It is a graveyard, and we know it. It was very clear for me that I don’t want to make an illustrative exhibition of people dying in the Mediterranean inside an art fair. That would have been something that would something that was called pornographic. We don’t illustrate the death of others. But, by giving power to the voices of all these people that are trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, but they don’t end up in Greece, in Spain, in Italy, because they end up in the depths of the sea, I think with somehow making aware everybody of our sisters and our brothers that they are not making it, you know, that’s the best we can do in this situation. We are not saviors. That is what I’m trying to say. It will be horrible to say, we just have to remind.

IV

AA: We suppose that a model of production and practice of creative solidarity underlies both your curatorial approach and the forum that will take place during the fair. If so, could you tell us about it, please?

MF: I just told you what is going to happen in the forum, but I think it’s a fallacy. It’s a problem as curators to think how the production of creative solidarity will look here. This is up to the visitors as well, to the audiences. We take out there, in the spaces of an art fair, independence spaces, you know that they will be talking, and they will be having round tables. We create intervention with people from flamenco singing through the megaphones, pregones, pregoneros. We create another forum on Saturday. One is on Friday the other on Saturday, that will be on independent spaces in flamenco and also in the program I really want to see how many people are going to join this program. Because this is where you see if there is solidarity or not. So I’m waiting to see if the solidarity will come to see what we offer. 

V

AA: Given that within artistic practice, through the symbolic mediation of some elements, solidarity can be generated, we would like you to present some of the elements on which the artists of your selected galleries focus?

MF: I can tell you where they focus but I cannot really connect this with the solidarity. So, I cannot really answer this question in any other way. 

First of all, I need to tell you that by accident, of these 19 galleries, only two are men. One is a dead man Jannis Kounelis, and the other is a man from Algeria, Mohamed Bourouissa. I called this ‘accidental’ but it’s not accidental. Why do I call this accidental? Because so many years, until 10 years ago, accidentally, there were always exhibitions where there were two women. So this is a statement. Even if we don’t put it in the catalog.

Second, there are women artists from Sardinia, or Palermo , that are dead now because they are older; from Turkey, Istanbul, that never had such a big exposure is as Janis Kunelis had, for example. These are Marie Lai (Sardinia), an Italian artist that now, she’s dead because of age, but you know we saw her work also in documenta 14. These are Letizia Battaglia (Palermo), the photographer that was shooting the mafia. And this is also Semiha Berksoy, a very well-known opera singer that was also painting at the same time: a very important woman of Turkey.

Then we have artists from Croatia, as it is a part that usually is not discussed as part of the Mediterranean. When we hear the touristic discussion of Mediterranean, it’s always Spain, Greece, Italy, France. When we hear about the deaths, it’s always the south Mediterranean. But, there’s also ex-Yugoslavia, Croatia. We have two artists. One is Sanja Ivekovic, quite known. She showed before many times in ARCO, and in many museums, and she comes from ex-Yugoslavia, all the artists she speaks about, the Women of Solidarity, very important figures that were not as well-known as the Men of Solidarity during the Cold War and the Communist years. And we also have Hana Miletic, a younger artist, she’s working with weaving, and she brings all the threads from clothing companies of the Yugoslavian era. You know the threads, and she makes the weavings by taking all these threads and calls them Unitas.

We have at the same time, a younger Turkish artist who is presenting a wonderful video about a friend of hers, a trans from Turkey that was attacked by people and almost brought to death. We have also Mohamed Bourouissa, for example. He is an artist that comes from this terrain of France, where people were living in the suburbs of Paris. He makes a project called The Hood. It’s photographs that are printed on car parts. So I give you a little bit of this overview. So already you have some concepts that we handle within The Mediterranean: A Round Sea.

VI

AA: If we may, we would like to cross, to link, your conception of the South as a State of Mind with the aim of the forum you have designed for the fair: to investigate the common culture of the Mediterranean countries.

So, if people act or do something in the presence of at least two states of mind: one, doxastic (beliefs, opinions), the other, conative (desire), and if it could be said that the different actors who have a culture in common share beliefs, which are embedded in new or other networks of relations, so what are the beliefs and desires that enable new global partnerships between cultural actors? Could you reflect on these questions to conclude our conversation? It was a pleasure, Marina!

MF: I respect very much your statement, because this is more of a statement and less of a question; but I don’t believe in ‘global.’ So I am the wrong person to ask this. I think this is an extremely problematic word; very, very problematic. Also, if you read our catalog when you get it, I don’t also believe in a Mediterranean identity. So in the magazine, if you go to the site and read our manifesto ‘South as a State of Mind,’ it’s not one identity. What you call ‘beliefs’ we call it ‘intensities,’ ‘shared intensities.’ So we have the same, maybe problems, the same concerns, but not beliefs.

We are in proximity. For example, Greece is much closer to Syria or Turkey geographically. Spain is much closer geographically (leave the rest) to Morocco than it is to Finland, Norway and other countries of the north. So, geography is one thing, climate is another thing. During the crisis (and that’s where we started the magazine), the lower part of Europe was called PIGS: Portugal, Italy Greece and Spain. This was called as such in the European Parliament, in the newspaper. It was not something that was only as jargon or slang. It was official. I mean, this alone shows something.

Shows an envy for the sun, for the sea, envy for another way of living that the north never understood about it. It was during the crisis a lot of newspaper saying, because the Germans that were lending us money were coming here to assess, ‘Oh look at the Greeks. They are sitting outside.’ But it was 30°. People didn’t have work. Of course you sit outside. We don’t have even money for the electricity to put the air conditioning. So these are some shared intensities that we share more with what is called global south, than what is called the global north and it’s very difficult to understand. So if you speak about the globality, I would say something that is called trans-locality, inter-locality and connect areas, not as a nation states, but as areas with shared geography, shared climate, shared ways of living, that they are after this climate.

I’ll tell you something that goes very long before. When this Greek nation was initiated in the late 1800s, it was initiated by a Bavarian king that was coming from Munich. He couldn’t understand what was happening here. There were a lot of tribes, a lot of languages, but people coincided with each other, because the Ottoman empire loved this hybridity and the different, the multiplicity. Not the Bavarian king. The Bavarian king wanted to domesticate the Greeks as if they were Germans so they become very productive. But our DNA never really could follow this. And also, there is an anecdote back then many people were coming because of the Bavarian king to see Greece. And one of them was Christian Andersen. He made some drawings where they were camels, where there were palm trees, as there were, but the Bavarian king tried to cut them, to eliminate this part, and then they said about Christian Andersen, ‘Oh, he’s writing tales, that’s not true.’ So this is a form of colonization. On the other hand, Greece is not in the cradle of Western civilization. This is something that the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans decided. We had 400 years of Ottoman empire, and even the ancient Greeks might not have been white.

Western thinking, Western thinking everywhere, even if you are in Brazil or Portugal or Spain everywhere, Western thinking. But why? What about South as a state of mind? What about if you would hear indigenous people and see the world upside down, maybe the environment would have been in a better situation globally. So for this, in the small publication that we have during ARCO, we have outside a map that was produced in the 1100s by geographer Muhammad Al Idrisi, which was hired by a Sicilian aristocrat working to make the map of the world. For the first time, back then, the world has the south on top and the north on the bottom. It’s not what is on top and what is on bottom, that’s not important. But what is important is that the global depends from where you’re looking at it, and we have to find a way to understand the different points of view.

MARINA FOKIDIS is a curator, writer, lecturer and institution-maker based in Athens (Greece). Her methodology of challenging the prevalent monetary economy with a love economy harnesses the power of trans-cultural friendships while emphasizing site-sensitivity and sharing. In 2010 she founded the independent space Kunsthalle Athena; while in 2012, she founded South as a State of Mind magazine, a biannual arts and culture journal that creates unexpected dialogues between distinct neighborhoods, cities, regions and approaches. In 2014, she was invited to become part of the core team for documenta 14 by artistic director Adam Szymczyk. She is currently curator the public program for Salzburg International Summer Academy for Fine Arts. In 2020 she was the curator for Vanderbilt University’s EADJ (Engine of Art Democracy and Justice) year-long program Living in Common in the Precarious Souths, for which she received a curatorial award of excellence by the Association of Art Museum Curators (US). In 2001, she was one of the curators of the 1st Tirana Biennial. In 2003 she was both the commissionaire and the curator for the Greek Pavilion of the 50th Biennale di Venezia, in 2011 she co-curated the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennial, (A Rock and a Hard Place). Between 2013 and 2014 she was the curator of exhibitions and public program and also initiated the curators’ residency  for Schwarz Foundation -Art Space Pythagorion in Samos, Greece. And more.

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