I’m going to attempt to make a contribution from a personal perspective in order to try and understand what’s happening with non-standardised good practices in the contemporary art sector. I’m going to speak out from down in the trenches, which is where we artists are, doing the hard grind, often using alternative or peripheral workplaces and mechanisms.

We currently deal with several forms of communications media in our public sphere. As I said in my presentation in The Spur project, the question today is “how to engage?”. How can we interact better with our public through social media and digital communications? On Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever social media platform we use, we are working with emotions, with entertainment, and these are good news for contemporary art as well.

Research residencies have specific features (short-term, no requested production, zero or low visibility for the general public) and therefore, they need an appropriate communication plan. Apart from the different usual channels and the possibilities offered by each, communication must be made while considering the different stages of the residency: before, during and after. The plan must respond to several requirements: how to be of use to the artist and his/her project, specific to the residency? How to convey the artist’s research subject to audiences? How to value the structure through artist research residencies?

When Marc Augé spoke of territory and space he pivoted the intangible abstract set against the measurable corporeal. When I conducted the project entitled “A place under the sun” for the CCBA in Buenos Aires, we shut ourselves away to rethink what the ideal format should be as a container for the arts, but also to suggest that the place is not the project. Discussing the benefits to be achieved by reactivating abandoned spaces to generate useful programmes for the community was one of the aims we pursued at the meeting held in Girona last year, linking it to The Spur.

New technologies have transformed the way in which contemporary art is disseminated, bringing many benefits but also unprecedented problems. While the daily press attempts to bridge the digital gap and traditional magazines struggle to survive, new online editorial platforms of unimaginable reach and impact are emerging.