Returning to the clay of the earth
● Laura Vincenti and I are eating a picnic lunch of New York salmon bagels in the Cape Town International Convention Centre, at a window overlooking the huge expanse that is going to become the Cape Town Art Fair but is now just a loose idea.
We are 24 hours out from the VIP buyers’ preview and the vernissage — read cocktail party on steroids — that takes place on the Thursday before the official opening on Friday. The rudimentary structure is in place, walls are being painted, and more than 150 galleries that are showing this year are now deep in the spirit-level, drilling, hammering, bubble wrap phase of operations.
Laura looks remarkably calm, albeit tired. She is the person at the centre of this hub of activity. She tells me her happiest moment is the solitary walkabout she will make tonight at 1am, when everyone has finished setting up. A moment of calm before the storm.
I love the idea of this powerhouse of a woman quietly pacing the fair with all its aesthetic marvels and visual gifts as it lies there like a sleeping beauty waiting to be kissed awake in the morning.
Laura moved to South Africa from Italy 10 years ago for love and never left. Her sojourn in Johannesburg blossomed into a love affair with the country. A visit to the Cape Town Art Fair, where she left her business card for the management because she was working in the art space in Turin and thought she should make the connection, turned into a meeting of minds.
The owners, who at that stage were in a partnership with Fiera Milano (the Italian company that now fully owns the fair), persuaded her to take over its running.
“My vision was to get this fair to grow and become international. That’s my ultimate goal. Because when I first started it was quite local. Nice but very small. And my goal was, OK, Cape Town is an international destination, a touristic destination, it’ sa wonderful place. We can have a fair that appeals to the public on a global scale. I started travelling around the world and promoting Cape Town the city.
“And then the Zeitz Mocaa and the Norval Foundation opened. So it was organic growth and a flourishing of the space in Cape Town. At the beginning it was not easy. But then also, because galleries from South Africa started going to international art fairs and lots of artists began to be exhibited in museums globally and in auctions, it has become a very different landscape.”
Laura was an architect before she was drawn into the art world and it is a useful prism through which to view the fair.
“A lot of my thinking goes into the flow — into the structure. So I prefer to build the fair as a small city, so it’s kind of urban planning, like having neighbourhoods, squares and avenues.
“This year the entrance will be quite different because our project, the clay cabinet, will welcome visitors with an exhibition of ceramic art.”
I wonder why she thinks ceramics are having such a moment.
“I think it’s just that sometimes history shows us quite clearly human beings need to go back and look at their past to find their roots in their sense of belonging, in order to move forward in life.
“And to me, clay is something that is related to your ancestors, to your way of being, maybe modelling reality, and it is something quite linked to art and crafts. So I’m very linked to the past, maybe because I’m Italian but I really believe that the past can teach us a lot. And I feel that when human beings are a bit unsettled, go back. So, I mean, we are living in quite an unsettling world.”
Her leadership has seen the fair grow exponentially. From a slightly becalmed affair when compared with the energy of the Joburg Art Fair, it is now abuzz with frenetic shopping vibes and a decidedly international slant, thanks in part to the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I’m not seeing collectors buy African contemporary art because it’s trendy. They are buying works to be part of their collections forever. So it means that it’s not a bubble.”
On Thursday evening at the vernissage I was hard-pressed to move in any direction without bumping into crowds of people I knew and a huge array of people I did not, because they were from all over the world.
A gallerist paused to take a breath and told me they had seldom experienced an opening where so many sales had gone down in the first few hours — sounds like a global success to me.