Unconditional support Juan Pablo, Alicia, Belen, Ana Photo by @leyre.lopezdelapaz

As the increasing cost of living pushes people towards monetising all waking moments of their lives, volunteering as a practice has fallen to the wayside, contained near exclusively to charity – religious or secular – and political campaigns. Matters that, through ideology or creed, are believed to be above oneself. Betterment of one’s community at a small scale is widely viewed as kind of a waste of time. If at least a benevolent waste.

But a good part of the services that we consider indispensable in our modern day society, services that we take for granted but do not often by themselves make a profit, began as forms of voluntary work:

 Firefighting squads, street cleaners, elder care for the working class, park or natural reserve rangers, and many others provide services that are considered baseline parts of our social quality of life. But despite how obviously important they may seem now some of these public fixtures would not have formed, and many would not currently survive, if it wasn’t for the volunteer work of a first few people. 

XTANT is a mutual support project first and a market a distant second. And it's during these busy April days where we, friends in our orbit, and strangers alike peel off of our busy day jobs, just to help in building up the exhibition that that fact becomes apparent.

It’s for that reason we call the event an all volunteer project. We work on our own collections, classes, jobs, etc.. to join together with people from around the world, who out of love for the community’s mission or a simple desire to help, set aside a chunk of their time so that we may nurture and grow our own one-day ‘necessary service’.

XTANT calls itself a ‘community’ but that word can feel meaningless with how carelessly it's thrown around. Whether it be in the empty sloganeering of large companies that claim to be ‘one big happy family’, or in content producer to consumer relationships, everyone wants to have a ‘community’.

But calling a space whose sole activity is the sale of products or content a community can feel kitschy, especially when examples of communities in the past operated like extended families of sorts. Places where, from shared interest and interactions in the real world, people would develop the language, in-jokes, relationships, and attitudes of their own unique sub-culture.

Since the fair’s first days we’ve been concerned with how within our industry, which has almost no non-commercial space, we could create a true, capital ‘C’ Community. 

Over the years we’ve worked to create a network of person to person connections that persist between large events, support networks among our artists that present help when the going gets tough, established a program of talks, free to entry tea ceremonies, exhibitions without products for sale, and series of audio visual displays across the many rooms and locales given to us for the event.

The goal of all of this is to hopefully create, beside XTANT’s market, a space that can foster real connections between artists themselves and artists and the public, outside of points of sale. Where someone isn’t talking about their work just to boost their public profile, or where you aren’t hearing someone’s thoughts so that a company may sell advertisements in the minute prior to their words.

So, from the bottom of our heart, thank you to all that form a part of our small Community.