5 questions with… INCA

INCA is a residency based project, with an exhibition space and a public program. Artists Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman opened INCA in Detroit, a city affected by the evolution of economy: the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy during 2013. 

1: While you were living in Oslo you opened INCA (Institute for Neo Connotative Action) in Detroit. Can you explain a little bit about the process?

Aeron Bergman & Alejandra Salinas: We founded INCA in 2011 but we had been thinking about it for years. After getting a small artist grant from Norway for art projects and a generous commission from German radio, we decided this would be the time to concretize our plans. We bought a home in the New Center, a vibrant and diverse neighbourhood in central Detroit. We formed a board made up of one person from Detroit one from Oslo plus ourselves.  We wrote a mission statement, developed a program and started to search for collaborators in Detroit as well as Scandinavia where we were based. When we started INCA we did so with the idea that it would change and adapt to the needs of visitors, neighbours, residents and different communities we planned to engage. INCA has therefore has been in flux since its creation.

We could add that INCA was founded to fill a what we considered a void in Detroit: there was no shortage of artist initiatives, but there was a serious scarcity of art spaces that had at the core a consistently critical, engaged, and inclusive discourse.