Art Assassin: How I Set Up a Project Space
In these columns, I will describe Arcadia Missa’s trajectory, from a project space and studios to a commercial gallery and small publishing house. My main role now is as a gallerist. The role of the gallery in relation to artists can be confusing and oblique if coming to contemporary art from the outside—I’ll be going into more detail on the artist-gallerist relationship in subsequent columns, but for now, I do want to say that it’s a big red flag if a gallery asks you to pay them a hire fee to do a show.
Arcadia Missa was set up in 2011. Coming out of university, I’d just started to enjoy talking about art and having a sort of place of assembly, so I felt a need to create space to continue enjoying and exploring this. How I set up Arcadia Missa can’t really be used as much of a guide—although I had seen London rapidly gentrified, become more expensive and untenable for many to live in, looking back on 2011 from 2022, it definitely was an easier time. My university fees were £3,000 a year. I took the tuition fees and maintenance loans and worked 4 days a week. I don’t know if I would have gone to art school if I faced today’s living costs and tuition fees of £9,000 a year.
My job whilst at university was waitressing in a casino, the tips were good, and my rent was around £450/month. I managed to save some of my maintenance loan, so when I graduated, I had enough for a rental deposit on a commercial property and some extra for set up. I hadn’t really planned to get a space when I began to save money, but it had been an instinctive thing to do—perhaps because of upbringing or perhaps because I was studying during the financial crash.
Practically speaking, the set-up was like this: I found a railway arch space because per square foot the rent was cheaper (in exchange for the constant sound of trains), my friends and I sectioned off the front third to use as a project space and built stud walls to create 11 studios behind the exhibition area. My friend Rachel Owen made a huge parachute-type thing to create a continuation of the wall separating the project space and studios (hung from the top of the arch down to the top of the stud wall). The studios were rented at a cost so that the rent and rates were covered if they were all filled, the shortfall for bills, times when the studios weren’t full, and any costs related to exhibitions (which we did on a shoestring) I supplemented with the tips I was still earning from waitressing, and the occasional party.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
“The moments with friends who share a drive to create something together and for one another can be some of the most influential.”
At first, the programme was very much created through a network of artists my friends and I knew from the existing scene in the area, or from university, or from people we knew through others who approached us and asked to put things on. Very early on, we started to do publications, and through this began a focused discourse, which seeped out into the discussion events we were having at the space. I began to have certain interests and a more precise idea of the direction I wanted the programme to go in. Around this time, I did a project with my friend from university, the artist Jesse Darling; it was at this private view that someone spoke to me explaining they were a relationship manager from the Arts Council of England and that Arcadia Missa should be applying for funding to do what we had been doing.
The various iterations of Arcadia Missa tie into the changes that came as it moved out of being a DIY project—with public funding, then through selling art—and these stages will be the subject of next month’s column. When I think back to the start of Arcadia Missa, it brings about very fond memories. Although I regularly advise young artists to not do things for free, the early projects were done with all of us working for free with one another. We weren’t making a living from art, but we all wanted to make the projects happen, and we were working together as friends. These kinds of moments happen often amongst friends and only feel comfortable when everyone is in the same boat. But, of course, as soon as one party is making money from art somehow, the terms need to be renegotiated and figured out fairly. There is, of course, a risk in noting the value of projects that are done purely out of love—always ask to be paid if someone approaches you. Yet it would be remiss of me to pretend that all self-organised projects start with being paid in mind—whilst many in the creative sector exploit this, the moments with friends who share a drive to create something together and for one another can be some of the most influential.
Words: Rózsa Farkas
