After five years in the CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo – Galician Centre for Contemporary Art), Ana G. Chouciño landed in Edinburgh in 2010, in search of new experiences and professional opportunities. She is now one of the team in charge of Interview Room 11, a gallery that is home to a variety of artistic projects, with a special interest in promoting Galician artists, and building bridges between Spanish and Scottish art.
Photo © Roberto González Fernández
After five years in the CGAC (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo – Galician Centre for Contemporary Art), Ana G. Chouciño landed in Edinburgh in 2010, in search of new experiences and professional opportunities. She is now one of the team in charge of Interview Room 11, a gallery that is home to a variety of artistic projects, with a special interest in promoting Galician artists, and building bridges between Spanish and Scottish art.
Where does your passion for art come from? What is your background? I think that my passion for art comes from when I was very little, and above all it comes from my mother’s influence. I’m not always aware of it, but there are little things that remind me of it. A few days ago I heard about the death of Alberto Carpo, a painter from A Coruña who was very good friends with my mother. And I remembered tons of things: visits to houses that smelt of paint, visits to museums when I was tiny… I suppose all of that awoke a certain sensibility in me, and when I left school it was a natural decision for me to study History of Art. Another influence was the fact that, although art is my passion, I never had any particular ability or desire to be an artist. I think I am better as an observer, and it was only a few years ago that I dared to write.
Argyle House (…) was about to be knocked down because lots of people thought it clashed with the historical surroundings, but in the end it was saved because it is one of the best examples of architecture of its decade.
Tell us about your work for Interview Room 11. How did the idea of creating this artistic space come about? The story of how Interview Room 11 came into being is quite complex, so I’ll try to tell it from the beginning. The Forest The Forest, which started in 2000, is a very well-known charity in Edinburgh. It had a café run by volunteers, and with the money they made they put on concerts, exhibitions… In the UK there are lots of incentives for organisations to collaborate with these charities, so for eight years they had used an old church in the centre of Edinburgh for free. It sounds surprising, but here churches are used for a lot of different things. Photos © Space Light Order / © Interview Room 11 / © David Guillen
A couple of years ago they had to leave the church, and the search for a new headquarters began. And that’s where Argyle House comes into it, a brutalist building from the late sixties. It was about to be knocked down because lots of people thought it clashed with the historical surroundings, but in the end it was saved because it is one of the best examples of architecture of its decade. The building had been used as government offices, but it had been abandoned for years, and so its owner – aware of the tax benefits – decided to donate three floors to The Forest. I arrived there by change, because a friend was passing, and was curious. When he went in to have a look, he happened to come across Mirja Koponen, one of the members of the charity, who told him that she was planning to use the space for artists’ studios and a gallery. She called this project Forest Centre Plus.
It seemed like Mirja needed people to help her, so one day I turned up at the building, and a few weeks later I joined the team. Although we started out with tons of volunteers with lots of ideas, in the end the gallery was created by four people: Mirja Kiponen, Scott McCraken, Ellyce Morgan and me. Between the four of us, we put up the walls (literally) in one of the corners of the ground floor, and the project, which we have now been working on for eighteen months, started to take shape.
What is the main objective of this project? I think that, for the gallery, it is very important that between the four of us we were able to define a common project but, on the other hand, each of us has very different parallel goals. My other three colleagues are artists, although they also have experience of organising exhibitions. For my part, I had experience in museums, and I was studying towards an MA in curation at the University of Edinburgh. Between the four of us, we managed to achieve a stable programme, we made some rookie errors and we learnt a lot along the way. When we opened the gallery, we weren’t exactly sure what the thrust of our programme would be, so we decided to open a call for submissions. We received a huge number of proposals from artists, which means that a lot of the work we exhibit isn’t based on commissions, but rather the decisions taken by the artists themselves, and we help the artists to realise them. This has turned out to be a very interesting experience, but also a big challenge for me because it isn’t how I was used to working.
What has struck me the most, especially since opening the gallery, are the facilities that are available here for this sort of initiative. We are taking up three immense floors of a building bang in the city centre. This would be totally impossible in Spain, unless it was done illegally.
But on the other hand, I am still very interested in curating, and almost without thinking about it I have started a series of exhibitions which will allow Spanish artists to be shown in the Scottish capital. The first project wasn’t in the gallery, but in the ECA (Edinburgh College of Art) it was called Shrinking Cities, a collective exhibition which I curated together with Antonio Cervera, for which we worked with eight artists, five of whom were Spanish.
Later on, this time in Interview Room 11, I brought in six more Spanish artists for The Oracle, and The Eternal Traveller Syndrome, which – with the collaboration of Iberodocs – I again curated with Antonio Cervera.
Plus, thanks to Edinburgh’s large Spanish community, we don’t just have Spanish artists. There are other professionals who have been interested in the gallery, and have also collaborated with us. For example, Sandra García Peinado, another Brit Es contributor, has helped us a few times; the photographer David Guillén has taken charge of documenting all of our event;, and the designer Iria Aldrey Dono is working on two of the gallery catalogues.
As you have mentioned, the gallery brings the work of Spanish (especially Galician) and Scottish artists together. What is the main difference between the art world in Spain and in Scotland? Which aspects of each would you like to keep? I worked in a museum in Spain for five years, so I know more about the art world over there. Over here, I have been immersed in this world for a much shorter time, it’s a scene I was not at all familiar with and, on top of that, it’s a different language. But I suppose that sometimes this perspective helps me to see things more objectively. What has struck me the most, especially since opening the gallery, are the facilities that are available here for this sort of initiative. We are taking up three immense floors of a building bang in the city centre. This would be totally impossible in Spain, unless it was done illegally. And this has nothing to do with people being more generous. It’s because the state makes it easier to use spaces that would otherwise be completely abandoned. It seems like quite a logical solution, and we all win, which makes me think that in Spain perhaps they don’t want to promote certain sorts of organisation. Over there, we are still investing more in the container than the contents, and any initiative of this sort requires a superhuman effort to go ahead.
Photo © Ismael Teira.
What are you working on at the moment at Interview Room 11? Our next exhibition will be a very personal project. I’m going to work with Antonio Cervera again, to bring over a Galician artist: Ismael Teira. During my Masters I discovered a theme that I’d like to keep investigating: drifts, that is to say, walking as a political and ethical act; walking as a way of standing up against consumerism and reclaiming a city in which public space keeps on disappearing. Ismael’s work is centred on this theme, on what he calls “desire paths”. He’s going to work with the building where Interview Room 11 is located, but also with the city, and he will bring the result of his experience to the gallery. It’s the first time that we have created an exhibition directly related to the building, but it’s a line that we would like to keep investigating in the future, with Spanish artists.
What other artistic projects are filling your time? As I have explained, Antonio and I usually work as a team. We met in Santiago de Compostela, but the coincidence of meeting in this city has led to a very fruitful collaboration. It’s very interesting because we have separate projects: for me, the gallery; for Antonio his new business, Art Travel Sense; but at the same time we have projects in common. Ismael Teira’s exhibition will be our third together, and the truth is that we are still learning a lot from each other.
At the moment, we have a more ambitious project in mind, which for the first time will involve Scottish artists as well. It’s called ‘Identities‘ and it stems from the connections between Galicia and Scotland. We want to talk about the Celtic imaginary, which still unites us, but also about the new traits that make up the identity of these two regions today. What makes us similar, what makes us different. This project will have a base in Galicia and Scotland, and will involve artists of various generations representing both places.
Our objective, in this and in all of our projects, is to take advantage of the distance. To harness the perspective gained from being far away, and to create a bridge that unites Galicia and Scotland. We are giving visibility to Spanish artists in the United Kingdom, but we would also like to open up a path in the other direction. We’ll let you know how we get on.