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Art Adapting: On-site vs. On-line

Vera Calheiros Menezes | C24 | Whitechapel Gallery | London, UK

 
 The Whitechapel Gallery, Photo: Guy Montagu-Pollock

Firstly, I was wondering if you can tell me a bit about yourself and the work that you do at the gallery?

I work at the gallery in public programmes so that means that all the live events that the gallery puts on for the general public come under my responsibility. The gallery up until this point in time has been committed to weekly events that combine talks, lectures, panel discussions, performances, which range from very low budget, DYI experimental things with artists to very high production, high budget events like Nocturnal Creatures. We also do large scale conferences including study days with academics, art historians, theorists, philosophers, so we have a wide-raging program in terms of the formats. In terms of thematic ideas, it’s a mixture of things that are developed with the exhibitions programme we work with, related to the main gallery show but we also do things with artists in a broader way. I believe that public programmes can be a space for generating ideas instead of exclusively responding to them. The fact that is the space where performance happens, it means I put a lot of energy into creating opportunities for performers.

Can you tell me about the adjustment to this new work reality created by Covid 19?

Well, it’s been challenging both on personal and professional levels because you go from a very active environment, working on weekly events where the main focus of your job is to interact with the public. So, to cancel months of events that I have planned, to come and work from home and completely rethink what the programme is going to be delivering, what it means to program for the new landscape of arts institutions producing online content, it’s been challenging. It’s been a quite physiological adjustment for me. But on a personal level, I think I’ve been quite lucky in being able to manage to work from home and that my home environment is stable.

In terms of work what have been the main benefits created by this new situation?

I’d like to think that the benefit is this opportunity to stop. But I don’t think that the Art World is going to take this as an opportunity to take a look at itself. I just think that everyone is battling, it’s just the battleground has changed. And so, I am hoping that within the context of my work, with Sofia that can have these conversations. I don’t know if they will be taken institutionally, but we are slimming down for the next 6 months, we will be every two weeks, opposed to every week and that’s a start. And that can mean that as we come out of Covid in the next year, two years, as we start having audiences in a normal way again, we may adopt a slower pace, which can be beneficial to us in the long way. I am sort of holding on to that because I believe that it is not necessary to produce as much as we have been, and within the organization, you might argue that that’s a bit controversial. This thing around pace, because if you have more time, you can be more targeted with what you do, you can promote it better, you can be more reflexive. This is where the opportunity lies, whether or not we are able to take on the opportunity is yet to be seen.

What are some of the challenges that you came across in this period?

Well, I think that are two interrelated things. The gallery hasn’t had a very strong digital strategy up until this point, which means it has been very difficult to easily move into regular online programming, and also to build a strategy for how to do that, so this is sort of working from scratch with them and trying to get the communications team on board so that we can start to deliver something. That includes understanding how these digital audiences work now with this digital focus. The other one is technical requirements, as you know, it is expensive to do things professionally, we need to get a full grasp on it and the staff that could advise us on this are not currently working because of the job retention scheme, so there is only so much we can do.

In the online space, the expectation is that it is always free. I was wondering if in the long term if the reality keeps on being as it is, how would you cope with this?

I guess this is more a business plan strategy question and this is a very important question, but I am personally not involved in those discussions. The recommendation that I’ve put forward is that there is no way that we can charge for this. Maybe, as we build our profile, we may feel that some events are chargeable paid events if that seems to be the trend, but if all the other organizations are delivering the same things for free, we’re going to be a real outlier and that is going to be very tricky to compete in terms of getting the audiences. I mean we’ve had issues with the prices of our events in terms of limiting our audience figures because of the price point of the tickets which has been not negotiable with the management team. A big-thinking will have to take place because up until this point I’ve had an income target, which I roughly meet every year. So, the gallery has to rethink if for next year budget will take that target away, or are they going to keep it there, which in this case we are going to really struggle to compete with other organizations.

Can you give me an example of a recent project of the gallery and tell me how it differs (or not) from your previous work?

I did a really good project which started in 2017, and the majority of it happened in 2018 and then we had the final event in 2019, which is The Rural Project. It involved a small consortium of partners that we invited to work with us, including universities, arts organizations and artists collectives, and international organizations like the Istanbul Biennale. We met three times and we developed what the conference was going to be, and at the same time, I ran a series of related public events at the gallery and in a couple of off-site locations. It was a very carefully mapped-out programme which had additional funding and The Rural was our flagship thematic programming for that period of time. It was considered to be very successful and international, got us a good reputation in terms of staking out positions around this idea. There was also a book and an exhibition in the gallery, so it was a very rounded programming project. It had been in my mind to start developing another strand of programming that would be ambitious in that way again. We needed a bit of a break because it was so epic and I have to work on other projects as well, such as Nocturnal Creatures. Now, I was in this phase in between things so, luckily, I hadn’t put a lot of energy into building up this new strand. I was hoping that the time that I would have working in a different way would allow me to think more openly about these research strands. I haven’t got to that point yet because it’s been sort of firefighting in terms of developing this digital strategy, but hopefully, once all of this is settled, I can start to put my energy on this. This year, the medium size project was Joe Moran’s commissions, which was one of the biggest things I was working on, and the larger finale moment would have been at Nocturnal creatures as well. So, that hopefully will turn into a film, so that is one way of adapting the work that was put into it, so that it exists in a form that can be shared even though it is not the live performance, which is obviously quite tragic, but just a reality, so yeah. I have quite a clear structure, but in 2019 I had too many projects. 2020 was supposed to be the year in which I scaled back the work I was doing, now it is a really extreme version of that (laughs). It’s building up again but with this digital strategy at the forefront, so it is challenging to think about. Because I had a good model, this Rural Model was really strong, I don’t think we can do things in those lines for a very long time, where based research leads to a conference. I don’t know how that would work digitally. One of the things I forgot to say is that something that has been hanging on the programme for a little while that we had to addressed head-on yet, is the sustainability question around the international travel. I have a feeling about what will happen is that we will be able to invite certain speakers, which will give a global outlook to the programme. Now, people may say yes to the online space, it can open more possibilities for who we can invite because the stigma around doing it online has gone and people are likely not wanting to travel, so they may say yes because their schedule will work in different ways. You could have shorter-term invitations for people that are further away and globalize the programme, so that’s kind of exciting.

But do you feel that something is lost with everything being online?

Definitely, I really believe in the live encounter. When its working at its best, that’s when I really enjoy my job. To feel that I am only producing things for the online sphere is kind of heart-breaking and I really have to figure out, see how the next year plans out. Maybe the new form of public programming isn’t going to be so exciting for me personally, I don’t know. But I am trying to go with the best outlook I can.

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Created By: Vera Sucena Paiva de Calheiros e Menezes
Published: 21-05-2021 19:00

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