PHOTO COURTESY ITALIAN PAVILION
It’s been a year since Art Basel announced plans for the first of its Art Basel Cities initiatives, a series of projects that aim to strengthen the cultural infrastructure in different global hubs through a week of public exhibitions and long-term programming. That first city to be chosen was Buenos Aires, and now we have a few more details about what’s in store.
Here’s what we know: The primary week of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires will take place in September of next year and will be led by Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art, and the curator of the Italian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. In advance, starting this November, Art Basel will establish an Art Basel Cities House in Buenos Aires as a headquarters where talks and workshops will be planned leading up to the main slate of programming.
“The Art Basel Cities Exchange will host residencies around the world for Argentine professionals working in the arts,” a press release says. In addition, there’s Project Bureau, a part of the exchange program that will be a “digital platform that aims to connect international art professionals with the local art scene to realize large-scale projects in Buenos Aires.” Integral to that will be crowdsourcing infrastructure for nonprofits to use for fundraising and an advisory board made up of the heads of Buenos Aires’s leading cultural institutions.
Further details about specific programming will be announced closer to next September.