Special section ARCO 40+1
Pedro Pitarch 

Special section ARCO 40+1

Pedro Pitarch 


For the this year’s ARCO contemporary art fair at Madrid’s IFEMA premises, Pedro Pitarch designed ARCO 40+1, a section conceived as an imaginary museum, to mark the event’s 40th anniversary. Inverting the spatial logic of art fairs, it is presented as a purely internal experience, a sequence of concatenated spaces that imports the museum context to a large fair. The participating galleries have identical spaces but adapt them to the requirements of the pieces on display. The migration from fair architecture to museum architecture intensifies through a change in the pace of circulation. The gridded floorplan slants at a 9º angle, breaking away from the orthogonal scheme of the rest of the fair, thus slowing down the visitor’s movement. The slight rotation forms a gap between the grid and the perimeter: a thick skin that serves as a spot for displaying the archive of ARCO’s 40-year history while providing a work area, a screening room, a meeting room, and an ARCO newspaper library. Finally, the section is divided into two parts by the fair’s central corridor, which dramatically slices the grid and brings the visitor directly into this museum interior.