SWAB talks
A Forum for Creative Thinking
Swab Talks 2025 presents itself as a living conversation space from which to reflect on the changes impacting contemporary art and its multiple ways of organizing, relating, exhibiting, and sustaining itself. Given the current convergence of economic, social, political, and environmental challenges, traditional structures in the art world are being questioned by the rise of new models that are more flexible, collaborative, and sustainable, forms of organization that respond to the need to imagine other ways of doing, caring, and exchanging.
These practices, often hybrid and born from the necessity for transformation, open new questions about the role of art in our societies and the types of relationships it can activate: between agents, with territories, with audiences, or even with the market itself. What forms of collecting can address the present? How do institutions support artistic practices experimenting with new formats today? What happens when galleries become porous spaces, capable of adapting to changing rhythms, languages, and urgencies?
Panel discussions will be accompanied by curatorial tours of the fair that allow each conversation to connect with concrete projects already experimenting with new ways of making and sharing from the artistic practice. Swab Talks 2025 thus positions itself as a meeting platform, where ideas and practices that are reshaping artistic production conditions from within can be not only thought, but also seen, shared, and discussed collectively.
BEYOND THE MARKET: TOKYO SEOUL
- THURSDAY 02 OCT
- 5- 6 pm
- In English
Moderated by Laura Peh
INGAHEE (Seoul) and Matter (Tokyo)
SPACE AND ACTION: strategies of dialogue between performative practices and the gallery ecosystem
- THURSDAY 02 OCT
- 8- 9 pm
- In Spanish
TALKS | GENERAL PROGRAM | Swab Talks area
Moderated by Oscar Abril Ascaso
Juan Hidalgo, founder of ZAJ, the pioneering collective of this language in Spain, once stated that performance is an art of space and action. A body that does something for a period of time, and yes, in a specific space. A space that has very often, of course, been an art gallery or an independent exhibition venue.
However, the collaboration between performative practices and the gallery ecosystem is usually the result of a circumstantial relationship that, according to broad consensus among agents, would seem today to demand a deeper dialogue, in order to jointly analyze the latent potential within that convergence.
What could a more structural incorporation of performance exhibition programs into the gallery context contribute? From where could new models of professional relationships between galleries and performance artists be developed? How can the collecting of artistic work arising from performative practices be fostered?
PALANCA is a program that has been sharing these questions in encounters with the art sector, held over the past two years at CCCB and MACBA. As an activity linked to the SWAB9 performance program, Space and Action is the first talk of this program to take place within the framework of an art fair, precisely where the sector itself comes together.
Quico Peinado (ArtBarcelona’s director), Pilar Cruz (curator), Manuel Exposito (collector) i Lluís Alabern (performance artist).
Cartographies of a New Collecting: Complicities, Networks, and Affections
- FRIDAY 03 OCT
- 5 – 6 pm
- In English
TALKS | POLAR AND TROPIC | Swab Talks area
Moderated by Carla Jaria
This conversation seeks to explore forms of collecting that expand the traditional notion of a collection and go beyond the possession of physical objects. Rather than focusing on the artwork as a material good, it discusses practices that prioritize long-term accompaniment, relationship-building, and shared care.
From private foundations and hybrid initiatives to museums and public collections, models experimenting with living archives, collaborative processes, and open methodologies will be addressed. Collecting is also framed as a political act, capable of sustaining specific contexts, generating hospitality, and opening up to other ways of being with artistic practices. The conversation proposes rethinking collecting as a situated, affective, and critical practice—one that opens modes of engagement, closeness, and listening within the artistic ecosystem.
Participants:
Martí Manen (Director, Index Foundation, Stockholm), Núria Montclús Carazo (Associate Curator of the Collection at MACBA, BCN), Antonio Echeverría (Co-director of Il posto and collector-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, Chile) and Sigrún Davíðsdóttir (collector, London).
Soft Galleries – Projects Attuned to the Present
- FRIDAY 03 OCT
- 6.15-7.15 pm
- In Spanish
TALK | GENERAL PROGRAM | Swab Talks area
Moderated by Carla Jaria
This session brings together galleries from Swab’s general program that are rethinking their models toward the territorial, the emergent, and the processual. These initiatives show a will to expand and diversify the role of the gallery. Through close engagement with geography—whether rural contexts, second venues, or long-term relationships with artists—these galleries activate new forms of mediation that respond to the art sector’s current needs.
Participants:
Participants: Anna Rovira (Palmadotze, Els Monjos), Jorge Bravo (EtHall, Hospitalet), Jorge López (Jorge López Galeria, Valencia)
RHYTHMS OF EXCHANGE: VOICES BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND EUROPE
- SATURDAY 04
- 5- 6pm
- In Spanish
TALKS | VORTEX | Swab Talks area
Moderated by Lena Solà Nogué
A conversation among spaces founded by Latin American cultural agents who, from different trajectories, are generating new artistic, affective, and collaborative communities rooted in displacement and migration.
Historically, Spain has been one of the main entry points into Europe for Latin American artists and cultural workers—due to linguistic, historical, familial, and administrative ties (passports, dual nationality, etc.). This session gathers experiences from migrants who are activating cultural projects through collaboration, mutual care, and dialogue with context.
How are cultural communities built when displacement is the starting point? This conversation begins from the migrant experience as a creative motor: a condition that pushes the invention of new ways of being, collaborating, and sustaining one another. Emerging practices not only allow continued creation, but also shared living and care.
Where is Latin American art when it is not in Latin America?
Many of the artists who arrive in Europe come with training shaped by Eurocentric logics. Often they have studied at institutions from the Global North, use globalized aesthetic languages, and hold European passports. Can we still speak of “Latin American art” from this position? Is identity a matter of origin, aesthetics, discourse, or perspective? Where does Latin American-ness lie today when the territory is elsewhere and the experience is already hybrid?
Participants:
María Ibáñez (JULIO, Paris), Juan Pablo Piñero (Casa Espacio, Barcelona), Santiago Gasquet (Curator, Buenos Aires) and Oscar Ramos (NSFW. Götteborg.)
TAIPEI AS A NODE OF INNOVATION
- SUNDAY 05 OCT
- 12:30-1.30 pm
- In English
TALKS | POLAR AND TROPIC | Swab Talks area
Moderated by Veronica Valentini (Hangar. Barcelona.)
As part of Polar & Tropic, the central curatorial program at Swab connecting art scenes between Northern Europe and the Southeast Pacific, this roundtable focuses on emerging contemporary practices within the Southeast Asian context, with a particular emphasis on Taiwan as a reference and exchange node.
In recent years, Taiwan has become a key meeting point for new curatorial models, artist-run spaces, and experimental formats, reflecting broader dynamism across Southeast Asia. From translocal networks to flexible institutional approaches, the region offers fertile ground for rethinking modes of artistic production, collaboration, and discourse creation.
Through the voices of curators and artists, this conversation will explore how these dynamics take shape at the local level, often via artist-run and independent initiatives, while maintaining active dialogue with the wider region. Taiwan’s role as a connector in this panorama allows us to reflect on how Southeast Asian practices resonate with, or diverge from, Western paradigms, not through opposition but through differentiation, friction, and parallel innovation.
Finally, existing connections between Taiwan and contexts such as Barcelona and the Mediterranean will be highlighted, via residency programs and initiatives that build bridges beyond geography and dominant narratives.
Participants:
Yipei Lee (SUAVEART, Taipei), Sean Tseng (ss space space. Taipei.), Shu‑Jung Chao (artist-in-residence at Hangar, Taipei).
(In)dependent SOLO
- SUNDAY 05 OCT
- 5 – 6 pm
- In English
TALKS | SOLO | Swab Talks area
Moderated by Carla Jaria
In recent years, independent spaces have ceased to be an exception or anomaly within the artistic ecosystem and have become an active and increasingly visible part of the cultural landscape. These spaces often emerge from necessity, urgency, intuition, or resistance, and over time they consolidate as places of production, thought, and community.
This panel brings together the cultural agents involved in the SOLO program to share their beginnings, how they launched these spaces, what sustains them, and what kinds of relationships they generate—both with their communities and among themselves—at a moment when the concept of network acquires new meaning.
Building from that, the panel proposes reflecting on what it means to build networks between independent spaces: to physically meet, share time, questions, and possible alliances beyond the local context. What value can a project like SOLO have today? And what could it become if we think of it not as a one-time program, but as the start of something that expands and sustains over time?
Participants:
Oriol Aribau (Espai 19, Barcelona), Tractora Koop (Atoi, Bilbao), Agnieszka Biber (C U AT SADKA, Kraków), Klara Wozniak (Szczur galeria), Constanza Piaggio (JULIO, Paris), Barbara Fecchio (BAM PROJECTS), Cayetano Truyols (Malpaís, Barcelona).