#46 Jérôme Pantalacci

Thank you.

I'm super happy to have the conversation with you.

So maybe we should step back to 2007 and maybe one or two years before that, because I assume there was an idea that kind of came to light in

2007.

So I always work in contemporary art in Marseille, from Marseille.

And I started in 2001.

He used to work in a gallery, it was a quite big French gallery based in Marseille, who had also a space in Paris during the 1990s.

So the gallery was working with artists like Daniel Buren, Pierre Rigue, Dan Graham, Jeff Wall, so many contemporary artists and international artists.

We also participated in different art fairs like FIAC.

And the gallerist was Roger Pellas.

He organized, he started in 1996 to 2005, an art fair inside his own gallery, because the gallery was 1,000 square meters.

And so each year, he invited eight young gallerists to come to show.

And it was a small art fair, very specific.

And many people loved it.

Of course, the galleries, but collectors also and institutions.

And so the galleries, they passed away in 2005.

And of course, the gallery closed and the fair stopped.

And then with the girl who worked with me at the gallery, we decided six months after the closure, So we decided maybe to continue this adventure of the art fair in Marseille because we thought that it was very important for the territory, for the city, for all the local ecosystems and for the artists, of course, but also all the people, all the art workers and art lovers.

And it was very dynamic for the city to be able to bring people from abroad and also to show, to discover the city.

So we started in 2007, started at La Friche, where we are still located now.

And at the beginning, we had only five galleries.

So it was very small and very specific.

And since the beginning, we decided to focus, because we are not in a big center for the market, we are in the periphery so we decided to to focus on the curatorial project and to at the beginning we invited galleries so they they didn't have to pay for the for the booth but now of course uh gallery is paid but it's we we we pay attention to to keep it uh the lowest as possible uh what we decided is to uh to tell out the booths related to the project.

Still now, it's always the same.

We propose to the galleries to design their booths, their space that is adapted to the project.