CARTOGRAPHIES OF A NEW COLLECTING: Complicities, Networks, and Affections

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) | 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.

BEYOND THE MARKET: Tokyo Seoul

Following the path opened by Focus Tokyo-Seoul last year—a program that allowed us to place the resonances and tensions between both scenes in parallel—this roundtable seeks to delve into how the economic and cultural conditions of each context shape their artistic landscapes today. In Seoul, the dynamism of a rapidly...

SOFT GALLERIES: Projects Attuned to the Present

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...

TAIPEI AS A NODE OF INNOVATION

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...

(IN)DEPENDENT SOLO

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,...

RHYTHMS OF EXCHANGE: Voices between Latin America and Europe

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,...

SPACE AND ACTION: Strategies of Dialogue Between Performative Practices and the Gallery Ecosystem

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...