Closed Galleries

Closed galleries is a project consisting on the acquisition of 41 former art galleries domains.

Due to the economic recession in 2007, around 224 art galleries closed in spain. Most of them closed its physical space and continued with its activity in their website. Still, there are a crescent number of galleries that closed both their physical and their virtual spaces, however, any search in the web suggests the opposite, showing all the data stored throughout the years about artists, exhibitions and press articles as if they were still going on.

Unlike what happens in a city, where it is easy to perceive the changes of the economy and market trends by seeing the presence of vacant spaces corresponding to former businesses, the reality of the internet functions in a different way. For the search engines, the same businesses are still alive and the more people look for them the more alive they are. These virtual spaces seem to be doomed in a permanent state of vigency.

This project seeks to make visible those closed art galleries by playing the same game, which is adding new data to the web so that search engines can finally find those spaces. Empty, after all.