APPETITE began in Buenos Aires in 2005 as an art gallery, but it was never particularly good at staying inside the definition of an art gallery.
It became an exhibition space, a meeting place, a laboratory, a party, a platform, a publishing experiment, a network, and occasionally something closer to organized chaos. Around it grew projects, collaborations and alter egos including War Club, Tanto Deseo, Popularity and others, as well as different incarnations of APPETITE in New York, Beijing’s 798 Art District, and Miami, where Legendary Chaos briefly took over a corner of Wynwood.
Some things lasted years. Some existed for a few months. Some left considerable documentation. Others left a few photographs, a story, a work of art, or somebody insisting that they were there.
I’m Daniela Luna. I founded APPETITE in Buenos Aires and have been behind, inside, around, or somehow responsible for these projects ever since.
APPETITE emerged at a particular moment in Buenos Aires and quickly became part of a much larger international conversation. We worked with emerging artists, organized exhibitions and events, participated in art fairs around the world, collaborated with artists, galleries, curators and institutions, and created projects that frequently escaped the boundaries of what a gallery was supposed to do.
That escape was probably the point.
Over the years, APPETITE expanded, mutated, disappeared, resurfaced and changed names, cities and forms. I changed too. My work moves between curating, art, music, writing, performance and other experiments, but the impulse behind APPETITE never entirely went away: create a space where things can happen that did not quite have a place to happen before.
This website is an attempt to bring that universe back together.
There was once another APPETITE website containing years of exhibitions, artists, photographs, press, projects and assorted evidence. That website is gone. So this one is being reconstructed from scratch, from old hard drives, forgotten folders, surviving images, catalogues, memories, internet archaeology and whatever else turns up.
It will therefore grow somewhat out of order.
Consider this less a finished institutional archive than an excavation in progress. Things will appear as I find them. Histories may acquire missing chapters. Ancient JPEGs may suddenly return from the dead.
The site will gather the history of APPETITE Gallery alongside the many projects that grew from its orbit, while also becoming a place for new work, new collaborations and whatever the next incarnation turns out to be.
Because this is not only about reconstructing the past.
Something is starting again.
APPETITE has always had a tendency to come back when nobody asked it to.
So here we are.