Mexico City is these days a coming and going of artists

QiPO Fair: “We want the public and artists to be able to build bridges and richer collaborations, crossing borders”

Laura Reséndiz, director of the collective art platform, and curator Pancho López talk about their intention to have a space that involves everyone without a vision focused on sales

The center of Mexico City is these days a coming and going of artists and fans of different expressions of art who are looking for a space to settle in and stay to watch. The bustling streets of the heart of the Mexican capital offer that and more, but in the Temoskali building, in the Ciudadela neighborhood, the QUiPO Fair headquarters is getting ready for the four days in which the two floors of the place host more than 30 proposals that have come from Asia, Europe, South America and North America. Laura Reséndiz, the executive director, and Pancho López, performance curator, assure that art week is an unparalleled opportunity to get to know this space in which artists and groups collaborate that seek to create a community and that want to connect with the public that He is not necessarily a collector or lover of contemporary art: “We want not only the public, but also the artists themselves to be able to build bridges and other richer collaborations that cross borders,” says Reséndiz.

It is the day of the opening of the doors of the Temoskali building to the fourth edition of QUiPO Fair and although everything is almost ready, curators, artists, and collaborators are fine-tuning the last details and rehearsing and rearranging everything once again. There are facilities of all kinds, music that begins to be heard from various points of the place; paintings and rooms full of pop culture references, colorful balloons, a woman prowls the hallways dressed as a virgin. Laura Reséndiz, the executive director of QUiPO, is calm and excited, and with a clear, radio-friendly voice she begins to tell the story of her journey that brought her here. She is an art historian by training, but she has done art criticism, television, production, and curating. She has worked in galleries and has founded the multidisciplinary project CICLO Arte para todos. “I came to QUiPO at the invitation of Ichiro Irie —the artistic director—, with the intention of generating new audiences and doing what we were already doing with our resources, so that we could join forces and generate larger, more ambitious and more concrete projects. We were already concerned about presenting other proposals in a space run by artists with other intentions outside the market,” he says.

From its origin, according to Reséndiz, this platform sought to integrate proposals that were in tune with what they were doing, even before collaborating as a collective. “Proposals—like ours—that had no place in the large fairs, first because we did not meet the requirements of being a commercial gallery or not having the time frame of three or five years of career, also because our interests were completely different, then competing With a market that is suddenly very aggressive, if it is not your sole objective, it is very complicated,” he says.

The decision then focused on continuing to hold a fair year after year with the mission of sharing visions with the public and artists: “We want to show people that there are other ways of knowing, living, understanding and enjoying art and in that sense , then we also seek to open ourselves to other audiences, to open ourselves to other audiences that are not necessarily connoisseurs or collectors and that contemporary art can sometimes be quite intimidating if you are not inserted in this community and that is why we want to be a fair with a quality like all the others at the museum and gallery level, but free.”

“Body language is much more powerful than words”
In 2019, Reséndiz met Pancho López, a performance artist with a career of more than 20 years in Mexico and with projects in several countries around the world. Thus, a year ago he was invited to be part of the project, and in this fourth edition, López is in charge of the performance part that takes place at QUiPO—according to Reséndiz, one of the strong axes of the artistic offer—in the framework of art week: “Performance serves to say what sometimes you cannot say. With the body you create metaphors, very interesting analogies with actions and you can address unapproachable topics or things so intimate that there is no way to explain a feeling. Body language is much more powerful, sometimes even than words. Performance is an immediate translator of any situation,” explains López.

During these days, as part of the performance program, national and international artists will be present with durational pieces such as Alexia Miranda (El Salvador), Prem Shiva (Colombia/Mexico), Celeste Flores (Mexico), María Eugenia Chellet (Mexico) and Mercedes Here (Argentina/Mexico). “What interests me a lot, at least in durational performance, is the interaction, that the pieces that are communal, that are collective, that involve contact with the public, not that they are these pieces that no one understands, but that in a framework of a fair, which is a communicative act, be an act with an artistic community and ties between galleries, because these actions will try to do the same,” he says.

As part of the special projects at QUiPO, a sculptural installation by Guerrero artist Aníbal Catalán, a light installation by Fernando Rascón and a painting installation by Ricardo Harris-Puentes will be exhibited. The design and lighting of the room has been under the leadership of Martin Durazo. The music that accompanies the tour through each space of the fair will be directed by TuttoFritti Radio (TFR); the musical selection and transmission, from Mixmaster Kar, El Fritojaguayano and Mortishead.