Fast Gallery

1. What made you choose art as a profession?
We got together as a collective when we found we had similar ideas on the cultural scene in our city. We moved from being consumers to thinking about the possibility of actually offering something: an appealing, dynamic, crosscutting point of view in keeping with our tastes and a way of working and showing things that reflected our expectations as an audience.

2. How would you define your work?
In Fast Gallery, we usually work by rethinking the idea of an “exhibition”. The collective is made up of different individuals, only one of whom is a plastic artist, so our work is based on creating spaces linked to art that combine different areas related to creation (plastic arts, video, performance, music, etc.) and crosscutting practices (experimenting with cooking, publishing, concerts, interventions in spaces, meetings with professionals, online documentation). We always try to get the audience involved as much as possible.

3. What subjects are you interested in?
We’re interested in a wide range of different subjects that make up an exhibition experience in lots of different ways on several levels. These possibilities are multiplied fivefold in Fast Gallery. When we’re working on a project, we bring them all together and focus on or rule out different ones to shape hybrid, multidirectional ideas.

4. What resources – formal or otherwise – do you use in your work?
We started work on our Fast Gallery “publications” in 2008 with very few means. In 2011 we’re now on our eighth experience. Although some things remain constant (a lot of attention to documentation, images, selecting artists and online communication), each project has had very different formats, motivations and partnerships.

5. What relationship does your work have with reality? What are your raw materials?
At Fast Gallery, we think everything is real, including our projects, interventions and objects. They are born from reality and stay there temporarily. However, as a concept, reality is present in our exhibition pieces to be reinterpreted by creating parallel spaces to established ones. In fact, we might be more interested in exploring a possible unreality or strangeness than everyday life.

6. What, according to you, is the point of art?
In our work it’s not our job to define the function of art in general, but rather to create the context in which to work on the art experience whatever its function might be. Even so, we don’t think art needs any particular given utility and we don’t think art is a service by a long shot.

7. How do you hope the public will receive your work? What audience are you aiming at?
Our exhibition experiences are aimed at an audience of all ages and interests. We’re not interested in an audience made up exclusively of specialists; we prefer everyone to enjoy art in a less conventional fashion to that offered by traditional exhibition formats, and we want to spark an interest in an audience less closely linked to the general art world.

8. What qualifications have you got? What do you value most from your time in education?
There are five of us in the collective and we each have different backgrounds. We come from very different fields of study and professions: design, philosophy, fine art, literature, etc. In our experience these fields complement each other very well and their fusion helps open us up to new ideas.

9. How would you define your current professional situation? And in the future?
As a collective, we’re on somewhat slippery ground. We aren’t artists or producers or curators as such. Our creative and conceptual work combines aspects of all these practices, together with not strictly artistic approaches, which makes our professional sphere difficult to classify in terms of many current standards in the world of art.

10. Many artists say it’s difficult to make a living from their work; how do economic considerations affect you when it comes to work? Do you think this has a bearing on your work?
Fast Gallery’s problem in all this is that art work is not currently regarded as the recognised, standardised, remunerated job it should be, which leads to a situation where every single creative agent has to earn a living elsewhere. Personally, we’ve passed through several phases of different economic conditions, we’ve received funding and we’ve dug into our own pockets. In any case, we try not to let money affect our activities.

11. What do you look for or expect from your relationship with promoters and curators? What advantages and difficulties have you found with these relationships?
We’ve received a fair amount of feedback from many artistic agents. So far we’ve had very satisfactory relationships with promoters and curators, but there always has to be a meeting point, an understanding, if projects are to work.

12. What do you think sets the arts scene in Madrid apart from elsewhere? What would you say are its pluses and minuses?
We think the city is constantly changing, although many art sectors might appear conservative or stuck where they are. There are hundreds of artists who don’t get the attention they deserve, many collectives working and creating without stopping, curators interested in new formats, etc. All this makes Madrid a powerful city on an artistic level.

Since it’s a small city keen to become an international benchmark, it’s easier to get seen, but on the other hand, it’s also a very self-satisfied and often impenetrable city.