SpeakART: Let’s start from an easy but essential question: what made you start?
Artæria Hub: We all come from artistic and cultural studies from an economical and administrational perspective. This, despite what it can be thought, pushed us to observe the cultural field with a strong critical attitude compared to the issues, the management, and the main characters of this world. The first work experiences, and consequentially the relationships, had our doubts on this field consolidated and they allowed us to generate in us the necessity to find a place and a role that belonged to us but even the necessity to help others to find them.

Artæría Hub x Sofia Bramuzzo – Courtesy of Artæría Hub

SpeakART: How were you able to give a concrete shape and a name to your idea? Which were the steps you made?
Artæría Hub: Apart from hours of lost sleep and discussions, artæría hub was born with a specific aim that had the shape already defined, that is organizing expositive events accessible to everyone (and consequentially to support the diffusion of contemporary art, often reduced to “I could have done it myself”), with the aim to enhance the local territory but still remaining inside the filed of emerging art.
We tried to follow the “rules” often studied such as defining a mission, a vision, and a social reason that could adapt to our necessities. From there, we started to simply “put our hands in pasta”. The name was born from a wordplay: it needed to be about art but we wanted to give the idea of a shop (such as delicatessen, pharmacy, and so on). The æ stays for “Emerging Artists”.

SpeakART: After a year from the foundation of Artæria hub, which are the results obtained and how did your current supporters respond?
Artæría Hub: We still have a lot to learn and explore and each day we measure with ourselves, with our capacities, and with the art world, a complex reality. At the moment each little step is for us still a challenge so every appreciation for our work is a milestone. At the same time, we unexpectedly had found a lot of support and interest from artists, the public, and even from the institutions. All the people we encountered were available to work with us and this offered us a lot of opportunities, with which in the future we will have the possibility to confront.

Lo staff di Artæria Hub – Courtesy of Artæria Hub

SpeakART: Which is the common thread to your choices?
Artæría Hub: Surely one of the main points is the accessibility: the newsletter, for example, was born with the aim of informing people about contemporary art trends, that often need to be contextualized to be understood, in a simple and funny way. Artists and places, to be accessible, must have the opportunity to succeed and be enhanced. 

SpeakART: Do you have the intention to take your project on a physical space (apart from “Pareti d’Arte)?
Artæría Hub: We’d love to. We care about the itinerant nature of the project, which gets back to the concept of territorial valorization and so it’s important to interface with different people, places, and realities. However, we’d love to have a place that represents the base like a house or a lab for ideas. This is one of the main aspects we are trying to define for the future. 

SpeakART: The social world is nowadays essential for every kind of reality, even for your reality it had a special role? Did the pandemic period influence your way of thinking about this project?
Artæría Hub: Socials are of vital importance because we need a wider and wider community and socials are an efficient way to obtain it. They allow us to do all the operations needed for giving visibility to the artists and to contemporary art itself. The pandemic period had influenced the initial stages because of the impossibility to organize events so we had more time to think and work about the embryonal stages.  

SpeakART: Do you have new ideas for the future? Some anticipations about your new initiatives?
Artæría Hub: We will have the management of the cultural Programmation of Lavena Ponte Tresa, a little town near the Swiss border. We will inaugurate in December an exposition event with a talented artist, Veronica Barbato, and in the next months, we had held an open call for other artists. In the meanwhile, we will have another activity dedicated to “Pareti d’Arte”, that fits art in commercial places. The next will be in Erba and in Milano. We are now working on our “Base”, and we are always open to new stimuli and inspirations. 

Parete d’arte – Courtesy of Artæria Hub

SpeakART: Like a young and innovative reality: which is your opinion about the relationship between art, digital, and technology?
Artæría Hub: This is, for us, a thorny issue because we think that it depends on the field of application and on the meeting point between these entities. For example, we appreciate the effort of some cultural institutions of making available, during the Pandemic period, on their website virtual tours about their permanent collection. This is, for us, an innovative and interesting way to match things. However, we believe that this digital transaction needs to be assisted to the “live” experience. Technology made possible lots of aspects and from this, the art world could benefit. But the art world still needs to find integral development.