The art world has always seemed to me to be overly elitist. A reality in which individuals and societies strive to achieve acceptance. In truth, this has always been the case. A simple statistic: the top ten percent of artists, known as the "Stars," control 90% of the earnings.

To change my mind, I spoke with Elisa Carollo, a young Italian curator and art advisor based in New York. Co-director of Pinto International, the New York outpost of the Pintô Art Museum, a contemporary art institution based in Manila, Elisa is finding and building her own dimension in the art world. She is curious and accepts challenges, which is why she approached Filipino art, which she put into dialogue with different cultures in the exhibition Our Islands, Their People: Becoming Archipelago. « A culture inevitably influences all of us, in the formation of our identity today regardless of where we were born, which then often does not coincide with where we grew up, where we live or where our families come from» she explains while we talk.

Its exhibition program is one more step toward not only a more inclusive art space, but also a more equitable one. This is how Filipino art has made its way into what Elisa Carollo sees as the city of opportunity, albeit in a more marginal and less obvious role.

How did your journey from Italy to America start?

Somehow, I have always been attracted to America, and to New York City in particular. I believe that the city has given me a lot in approaching contemporary art, and its system: here for the first time, I discovered that there was a whole world of galleries, art in addition to the many museums I had visited so far.

After my first experiences in the art world in Italy, I realized that this city was the only one I had to invest in and return to if I wanted to advance my career in art, gain a competitive edge, and hope to go that far beyond assistant roles etc., not coming from a family of collectors or already in art. Unfortunately, with the pandemic I was stuck in Milan after returning to Europe for TEFAF Maastricht, and with the suspension of flights I lost my visa that was in progress for a step further than that of student.

I've only just managed to get back in, but if I managed to get back in the end, I owe it also to what I did in my homeland during these two years of return to Italy, thanks to what the states had given me before. As soon as the opportunity arose and a number of things lined up both to make a new visa and to make it more sustainable, I decided to take a risk, abandon everything again (including a fairly quiet life in Milan between couple, work etc) and return to the States, knowing that either I did it now or I would never do it again going forward.

What steps are you doing to get into the art world? Are you still on the move, or have you settled into your own dimension?

I believe I am progressively discovering my artistic dimension, or that I am battling for it and acquiring it as I go along, building it up. I must admit that, in the previous year, I've become more capable of deciding what I want to accomplish and what I'm passionate about, as well as what I can avoid.

Despite the fact that my career began in the market, thanks to my position at Pintô and the one at Fondazione Imago Mundi, I'm now gravitating toward cultural/curatorial projects. I believe that my true field of action and expertise is shifting more and more towards emerging/ultra-contemporary art, particularly as a result of presenting American artists for gallery programs in Europe.

I engage in conversing with artists, connecting artists and operators for the correct projects, and seeing them through to completion. At the same time, I enjoy writing about art, and I'm grateful for the possibilities I'm getting to do so through Art She Says and other editorial contributions to Italian art journals.

Approaching Filipino art isn't easy. You not only promote an entire program about it, but you also became even co-director of a Filipino art entity. What drew your attention to this reality and which is now your mission?

It is a region that the western art system, like In Europe and US, has yet to fully explore, but one that is no less fascinating.

The Philippine art system, particularly its market, is expanding, and local galleries like SilverLens, which displays at Art Basel and will now also exhibit at The Armory in New York in September, are already part of major international fairs. It's been a terrific find for me because it's allowed me to broaden my interests to include Southeast Asia.

To help you comprehend, below are some historical stages: although a first form of art system emerged in the Philippines in 1821 with the establishment of the first modern art school in Manila by artist Damian Domingo, and was then strengthened with the first real investments in art during the Marcos regime and the establishment of the first public museums, the primary and secondary art markets have increasingly consolidated in the country, particularly since 2000, with a new democratic opening and the creation of new expressive and commercial art. Today, the local market is experiencing significant results and pricing, despite the fact that it is still largely regional.

I took on this assignment because of my voracious curiosity, and as I dug deeper into the Philippine scene, I noticed some interesting parallels to the Central American and Caribbean scenes that I was already exploring. These countries, despite their seeming distance, have a lot in common in terms of colonial history.

As some have commented, (also a previous exhibition in Pintô took its title from this) the colonialist past of the Philippines can be summarized as «three hundred years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood»: after three centuries of Spanish domination, with the Treaty of Paris (1898) Spain ceded control of the archipelago to the United States for only 20 million dollars, and the Philippines was treated and managed on par with other Central American states such as Mexico, Cuba or Puerto Rico. Both of these influences, the Spanish and the American, are a major theme in contemporary Philippine art today, as in that in those regions.

Hence my proposal to put them in dialogue, with this new cycle of exhibitions at Pintô International now that I have taken over as co-director. The idea is precisely to trace interesting parallels between the practices of Filipino, Filipinx and Central American/Carribean artists who demonstrate that they share similar approaches to issues related to post-colonial consequences, identity or traditional knowledge and cultures to be revitalized and recovered through contemporary art.

This parallel also aims to develop new opportunities for discussion and dialogue that can generate greater awareness of the similar colonial and/or soft power role exercised by the United States in these regions, but which many Americans (to my surprise) ignore or are not familiar with anyway, especially regarding the history of the Philippine/US relationship.

Let’s deepen into the exhibition. How was it conceived? Where does the artistic dialogue promoted by the exhibited artists want to go?

As it often happens, I worked on this exhibition in parallel, sometimes even unconsciously and in parallel with other projects or research, especially in terms of the concept and the message it wants to convey. I knew that I wanted to open the new exhibition program by dealing first with the theme of identity in order to contextualize these parallels.

A lot was given to me by the conversations with artists, and then those with the artists that I then wanted to involve. So, I went to find out how artists from various backgrounds were sharing this reflection that often sees, first a deconstruction of the cultural/material heritage of their countries of origin, in order to analyze it, question it and then rethink from it a new, more fluid notion of "indigenousness" within the current framework of a transnational and global culture such as the contemporary one.

Relevant in this sense was, for example, the dialogue with one of the "Native American" artists included, Cannupa Hanska Luger (of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota origin but also with European descent) who for some time now has been working on this "21st Century Indigeneity", in which "native" culture with its symbologies and values already beyond stereotypes fluidly joins the contemporary global one.

The idea is precisely to embrace a notion of "indigenous community of the planet", which speaks all the same hybrid and idiosyncratic language, in its richness, and which therefore treats equally all the various people from different origins, as well as the planet itself of which we all recognize ourselves as equally part.

A similar approach is carried out by another native artist like Tlingit tribe and Unangax̂ Nicholas Galanin whose practice explores the misappropriation of native culture, the impact of colonialism and the collective amnesia of its consequences. Similarly, the Puerto Rican/Mexican Ulrik Lopez with his "codes" of symbols recovers and reinvents a Caribbean archaeology largely lost because it is linked to ephemeral artifacts. Miguel Angel Payano with his semi-surealist representations reflects on how identity is a "social construction", as it is shaped through conversations and exchanges that we entertain during our lives interacting with different cultures and languages. In the ceramics of Alejandro Garcia Contreras Mayan symbologies thus fluidly meet those of Japanese pop Manga and Anime for strange cultural mixes created in the region of Chapas, while the works of Caroline Garcia and Eric Zamuco deal more openly with the conflict of identity, between acceptance and forced assimilation of dominant cultures.

The title of the exhibition emerged from a conversation with the artist Sara Jimenez, who in explaining the concept on which I was working pointed me to this book Our Islands and Their People as Seen With Camera and Pencil (1899), one of the first to document and trace possible similarities and parallels between the Philippines and Central America, at the dawn of their acquisition by the United States, albeit always from a colonizing perspective.

Have you ever been familiar with the work of the featured artists or you learned about after an initial selection?

I was already in contact with most of the artists included, or I had the opportunity to get in touch (sometimes even by fate) just in this last year before arriving at this exhibition and this program.

It's different for the Filipinx artists included, namely Caroline Garcia, Sara Jimenex, and Maia Palileo Cruz, who I approached as well as then Filipino Eric Zamauco, who I only approached with the opportunity of this new role from Pintô International and delving into the Filipino and Filipinx art scene to see which artists were similarly working on these themes.

Do you think they are rightfully represented or is "artist fame" still a niche phenomenon?

Most of the artists included in the exhibition have already received or are receiving some recognition, both from the system and then from the market. Galanin, for example is represented in New York by a gallery like Peter Blum and had been included in the last Whitney Biennale in 2019, as well as other major events like Desert X, Palm Springs (2021); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Venice Biennale (2017); Whitney Biennial (2019); and Honolulu Biennial (2019). Equally impressive is the cv of an artist like Cannupa Hanska Luger, who is having many exhibitions and projects in various institutions across the States and whose works are in important collections ( such as the North America Native Museum Zürich Switzerland, The Denver Art Museum Denver CO; Nevada Museum of Art Reno NV; Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Santa Fe NM: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art Norman OK; Yale University Art Gallery New Haven CT; Conley Gallery, California State University Fresno CA; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum Detroit MI - pick and choose you). Miguel Angel Payano is another artist who is having great success, with exhibitions this year from Los Angeles to Milan via London with a group show at Ben Brown, as well as Shiraz Bayjoo who has just done a project for the Diaspora Pavilion during the Venice Biennale, and is currently participating in a group show at the Zeitz MOCA in Cape Town. Also with regard to Filipinx and Filipino artists*, Maia Palileo Cruz's work is being acquired by major American museums, including The San Jose Museum of Art, CA, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC, The Speed Museum, KT and The Fredriksen Collection in Norway, Sara Jimenex was recently acquired by the Ford Foundation. The video we present of Caroline Garcia was instead commissioned by the Sidney Opera House, while Eric Zamuco is one of the most established artists on the Philippine scene today.

An artistic dialogue between culture: Elisa Carollo’s point of view

Why is fashion important to me

I am not afraid to be judged by my style