Ch.ACO 2018: About the Fair

The celebration of the arts reaches the entire city

Ch.ACO, Chile Arte Contemporáneo, is an institution that focuses on the development and internationalization of the visual arts industry in Chile and Latin America. Through the promotion of art collecting as a driving force for the growth of the country’s cultural patrimony, it contributes to the creation of the contemporary art market and promotes cultural tourism in Chile. This year, Ch.ACO is celebrating its tenth anniversary during the entire month of November, with different public art initiatives that will take art to key areas of the city. Ch.ACO Art Fair, the event that marks the culmination of this month dedicated to artistic interventions, is set to take place from November 22nd through the 26th in Parque Arboleda Lo Curro.

INTERVENTIONS IN SANTIAGO / Ch.ACO Hits the Streets

In order to celebrate our tenth anniversary, several international urban interventions will be carried out during the month of November, seeking to connect the city’s inhabitants to visual arts and place Santiago con the international map, along with Santiago’s city government and the Ministry of Culture, the Arts, and Patrimony. The selected projects, which have been presented in different cities of the world and the region, aim to change the capital’s landscape for a few days, inviting children, teenagers, and adults to enjoy the works of art on their everyday circuits.

New Location: This year, the Fair will be held at Edificio Parque Arboleda Lo Curro, a real estate project developed by PazCorp and designed by the prominent architecture firm Izquierdo Lehmann. The event will take place in the building’s ground floor, encompassing over 6,000 square meters with the best representatives of contemporary art, both from Chile as well as abroad. Located on over four hectares of terrain, the space accommodates a large park developed by renowned landscaper Juan Grimm. All of this is complemented with a design concept developed by Enrique Concha & Co. For the first time since the Fair began its itinerant phase in 2016, taking place in buildings that are under construction, it is occupying a space that will become a residential project once the Fair has concluded. The park’s predominant role and the sophisticated design of each residence reflect Izquierdo Lehmann Arquitectos’ concern for achieving spaces that truly enhance the living experience of this exclusive project’s residents, becoming a work of art in itself.

Programs: This anniversary edition will bring together over 60 exhibitors from 15 different countries of the world, including galleries from Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, México, Ecuador, France, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, and China. As in previous years, the Fair is divided into four sections, three of which (Focus, Planta, and Nave de Ediciones) are curated. In all four sections, there will be works of art by over 300 artists from Chile and abroad.

MAIN: This is the Fair’s main section, where one may obtain a complete panorama of the state of contemporary art in Chile, Latin America, and the rest of the world. For this tenth edition, we have incorporated an editorial committee consisting of several experts from the world of art, galleries, and curatorship: Patricia Ready (Chile), Bernardita Mandiola (Chile), Juan Carlos Bendana Pinel (France), Giancarlo Scaglia (Peru) and Ignacio Szmulewicz (Chile). This section will present 26 galleries from Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, United States, Spain, France, Germany and China.

FOCUS: This section, created three years ago by British-Venezuelan curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, presents the work of national and international artists in regard to one common theme. This year, the section will present the work of 24 artist represented by 12 galleries from countries such as Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, United States, France and the United Kingdom, and the central thread they will be developing is the relationship between interlocution and contexts in the world of contemporary art, rendering accounts of the political, social, and cultural realities experienced by each of the presented proposals.

PLANTA: This section, curated by Carolina Castro for the third year in a row –and this year, in an unprecedented fashion, by Matías Allende as well— brings together Latin American spaces, most of which are young and independent, that present an alternative to commercial galleries. These spaces also render accounts of the social and political contexts that are taking place in each of the countries that they represent. At the same time, this section is configured as a platform for disseminating and lending visibility to new generations of artists, as well as to collaboration-based management models. For this edition, the section will present spaces from Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico.

NAVE DE EDICIONES: This section is curated by the director of Tonic magazine, Camila Opazo, and gathers the most important publishing houses from Chile and abroad that specialize in contemporary art books and printed publications. In an unprecedented fashion, this year the Nave de Ediciones section has held an open contest, together with Ograma, a printing company, in order to grant a publishing house from any part of the world the possibility of printing a publication in co-production with the Fair. Out of the 80 publishing houses that applied, the winner was Meier Ramírez, a Peruvian publishing house owned by Andrés Marroquín, with his project: Blue Pieces, a book by the artist Jerry B. Martin, which will be launched in the context of Ch.ACO Fair. This year’s edition will present publishing houses from Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Fair Programming: The Fair’s inauguration will take place on Thursday, November 22nd, and starting from the following day, it will offer a series of art-related activities. These activities include: an intervention by two international artists, José Carlos Martinat (Peru) and Magdalena Fernández (Venezuela), who will present the large-format pieces that they have created especially for this edition of the Fair; awards ceremonies for each of the Fair’s sections, including the Ca.Sa Award, which has been presented to an artist participating in the Planta section since 2016, and the Lagos/Planta Award, which gives a Planta artist the opportunity of carrying out a residency in Lagos, Mexico; musical concerts organized by RedBull, who will be responsible for bringing music to this edition of the Fair, along with Planta section artists; interactive activities and workshops for children as a part of the children’s section’s programming; and conversation panels amongst key figures of the art world, professionals, and directors of institutions, both from Chile as well as abroad.

FAVA Gala: Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the Art Gala organized by FAVA will honor the artists. They are the protagonists of this traditional fundraising event that kicks Ch.ACO off, and which has the objective of raising funds for the acquisition and donation of a work of art by a Chilean artist to a renowned institution. This year, the chosen piece will go to the Phoenix Art Museum.

The FAVA Foundation was created in 2013, with the purpose of promoting the investigation, development, promotion and dissemination of culture and visual arts. Throughout the entire year, the Foundation works towards the development of four main pillars: to encourage philanthropy, to contribute to education –through programs that tend to mitigate barriers for gaining access to visual arts for children and teenagers—, to promote art collecting, and to safeguard and appreciate cultural patrimony.

The Art Gala is one of FAVA’s main highlights of the year, since it is through this event that the Foundation can advance the development of philanthropy in our country, encouraging art collecting and contributing to cultural patrimony. For its fifth edition, the donation will be destined to the Phoenix Art Museum (Arizona, United States). Its curator, Gilbert Vicario, will travel to Chile, and together with curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill —who picked the donation’s allocation—, they will select a piece by a Chilean artist that will go on to form part of this museum’s collection. The Art Gala has a cost of $150.000 CLP, and gives attendants access to a preview of the Fair and to Ch.ACO Fair’s VIP Program.

FAVA Art Gala. Wednesday, November 21st at 9 PM. Edificio Parque La Arboleda Lo Curro. Inscriptions at [email protected].