During the three days of the event, citizens enjoyed free transportation and guided tours of the six art circuits -Centro Histórico, Macarena, Teusaquillo, Chapinero Central, San Felipe and Chapinero Norte-. Thanks to an alliance between the CCB and the Government of Cundinamarca, which seeks to strengthen the business fabric in the 59 municipalities in which the Chamber is present, the official venue for ARTBO | Weekend was the Palacio de San Francisco, a neoclassical monument, where the activities of the Conversations, Intervention and Editorial Encounter components were held.

Ovidio Claros Polanco, executive president of the Bogota Chamber of Commerce, said: “this year we managed to increase the total number of visits to the participating spaces, which excites us because we continue to contribute to the democratization of access to art and the promotion of valuable conversations about our environment.

Conversations brought together twenty (20) curators from different national and international institutions, aligned in their relationship with collecting and the preservation of artistic heritage. This series of talks was curated by Raphael Fonseca, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum. There were also national guests such as Relámpago, a project by Andrés Fresneda and Valeria Giraldo, who were in charge of the curatorship of Encuentro Editorial.

En Intervención, a commercial group exhibition made up of works from participating galleries, was curated by María Isabel Rueda under the title La araña tiene la mosca en su cabeza (The Spider Has the Fly on its Head). The exhibition has a digital catalog that can still be consulted here.

ARTBO exhibitors talk about ARTBO | Weekend

Ana Fernández, Co-director of SN Macarena (Macarena Circuit)

“This ninth edition was the best attended and best organized so far. It is evident that there is a constant intention to improve, and every year we are surprised by the results [...] ARTBO | Weekend has consolidated, in my opinion, as a key platform to expand the reach of galleries, allowing them to connect with new audiences and transcend the limits of the usual public. At the same time, it has democratized the scene, opening traditionally closed spaces and bringing more people closer to the intimate gallery experience.

Alberto León Gómez, Bookseller at Wilborada (Circuito Chapinero Central)

“For us it was very important to have participated in this edition of the ARTBO | Weekend Book Route, because it gave us access to a different public that is not so far from the bookstore public [...]. It was a very rainy weekend in which I believe that ARTBO visitors easily contributed 30% of the people who came to the bookstore. We are happy and hope that next year we will be able to offer some artistic activity”.

Lali Giraldo, Director of Casa Plástica (San Felipe Circuit)

“From Casa Plastica, we want to express our deepest gratitude to the whole team that organized ARTBO | Weekend. For us it was a wonderful weekend. We had a great attendance and we had around 2,000 people who visited the Casa. We had exhibitions of seven artists, it was very admired, even, several works were sold and others were left with the contact for later”.

For more information about ARTBO | Weekend and other ARTBO initiatives, visit www.artbo.co