As Roberto Jacoby, executive director of Start Foundation and creator of Venus Projects, says: “The most important thing about the project isn’t the technological aspect but the concept that all the people who intervene there want to make their needs and wills come true, by the cooperation among each other. At the moment, cooperation is mediated by enterprises or the State, that is why this one is a possibility for most advanced and connected sectors to meet directly. The money is a way to measure the exchange and coordinate collaboration, which is decisive. It is fundamental that the artists themselves nourish from what the others produce”.

That’s how, within a critical and harsh environment, full of contradictions and troubled waters, a group of 260 people (and growing) now survives. They exchange objects, teach and take classes, build stuff, write a magazine, work together into the most exhilarating projects, reunite in a pop band, get together to make things and never stop creating, with a playful imaginative spirit: the ultimate answer to everything.

Last year witnessed the most bizarre fair. It offered really old magazines, international unique candies, photocopies of photographs, cool vintage clothes and French lessons: everything in the same place, at the same time. Meanwhile, in the second floor of the same building, someone took the portrait of every assistant to the fair, forcing him or her to hold his or her perfect smile. Downstairs, the seed of the band Polen was beginning to grow. Eleven girls in their twenties took part of this strange group who sings their own repertory but doesn’t have an audience.

Day by day, the project keeps growing. The members of Venus adore hedonism and claim to be photographed enjoying life. Who are they? We don’t know. Anyone of us can actually be there, sharing a beautiful world with no money and no preoccupations. They just have to be themselves, free generous people who are recovering some of the hippie spirit to spread its seed into this land of hopeless and empty search for success.

Venus Project
Date: May 12th, 2003
Place: MALBA
Address: Av. Figueroa Alcorta, 3415 Buenos Aires
Tel: +54 11 4808 6500
https://www.malba.org.ar