The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 4: Salome Asega
Described as the “next generation of leadership”, in this episode we welcome Salome Asega, the director of NEW INC in New York and an accomplished artist, whose work is at the cutting edge of creativity and technology. Salome’s ability to look towards—and build—the future shines through in this conversation with host Charlotte Burns. Part of her work at NEW INC, she says, is about creating chance encounters for creative people who feel like “choosing your own adventure.” What if we focused on new inventions, narratives and opportunities? Tune in for more.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome back to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns and this is the podcast in which we imagine new futures.
[Audio of guests]
This episode I’m delighted to welcome Salome Asega, the director of NEW INC in New York, and an accomplished artist whose work is at the cutting edge of creativity and technology. Salome’s been described as the next generation of leadership and her ability to look towards and to build the future shines through in this conversation. I really enjoyed talking with Salome. She brings a lightness of touch to really profound ideas and strikes me as a natural inventor. We talk about power and about leading, about technologies and what art can do. We talk about money and new ways of funding culture. Salome’s inspiring to listen to. Part of her work at NEW INC is, she says, about creating chance encounters for creative people that feel like choosing your own adventure. This conversation takes us from PokemonGo to water spirits and how the next gen of creatives are looking for opportunities to break the rules. Let’s go.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
Salome, thank you so much for joining us. It's such a pleasure to have you here on the show.
Salome Asega:
I am so thankful. Thank you for the invitation. I've had friends on the show and I'm a new fan of the podcast.
Charlotte Burns:
Thank you very much. Hopefully, you still are by the end of the interview.
[Laughter]
So I wanted to start talking to you about your role at NEW INC. When you were appointed in 2021, Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, said “Salome is a next generation of leadership and a role model for the interdisciplinary nature of the future of work. She's a creative technologist, a thoughtful strategist, and an empathetic community builder who will shape the next chapter of growth for NEW INC.”
Very nice to be described in that way. How do you feel about being called the next generation of leadership?
Salome Asega:
It is very kind. When I think about my journey to NEW INC, it's super windy.
I actually have a long history with the program. I was an artist who participated in the third cohort and, I joined a team of other artists and thinkers who had really tough, big questions about institution building. And we were there as a group of artists trying to form a nonprofit organization called Power Plant and in the process of building that, we like learned all the things that need fixing the nonprofit sector. So to come back to NEW INC seven years later being able to apply some of what I've learned in the past seven years is quite incredible.
Charlotte Burns:
I'd be curious to know, seven years later, would you still see the problems as being the same or are we just in a different frame? Because seven years ago feels like a lifetime ago.
Salome Asega:
Yeah, I think more or less the challenges remain the same, but maybe we've just gotten better at asking more nuanced questions around how to frame the challenges. Even in 2016, as like a young artist working in a collective of other artists, we had deep concerns around the funding of this work. Where do we go for money?
We quickly learned that every funding relationship is also an interpersonal relationship. And so we were asking basically, “Who do we wanna be in partnership with?” And I feel like those are questions I'm still asking today.
Money is complicated and who you take money from sometimes comes with asks that maybe steer you away from the original goals of your project or initiative, right? And so sometimes that's good and sometimes it can be a distraction. I feel like those questions I'm still dealing with seven years later.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you approach that as a leader of an institution? Which I imagine is related, but probably different to how you think about that in your art-making.
Salome Asega:
Personally, as an artist, I'm pretty cut and dry. I don't do things I don't wanna do. There's a bit of a privilege in that, you know, because I'm a solo practitioner and I can make decisions for myself.
Whereas when I am the leader of a program, I am considering benefits and opportunities for a much larger demographic of people, right? A community of people. And I'm always thinking about, “Who can this help?”
There's some things that I do that I know might be a mountain of work on our end, but the outcome of it will mean we'll be so effective for many in our community. It's a different mind mindset, I guess. You're working in service to an audience in a community you serve.
Charlotte Burns:
Would you identify funding as the single biggest problem that nonprofits face?
Salome Asega:
Not the single most. I think a close second is storytelling and communications. Many people, ourselves included, are so head down doing the work that we forget to talk about the work that we're doing. But the storytelling piece is important. That's what keeps people engaged and wanting to plug in. But it’s hard to do it all. You know, once you've designed the program, invited everyone, filled the room, then you gotta talk about it. You know, you're like, the work can feel like it never ends.
Charlotte Burns:
You've been inside various institutions from New York's Parsons School of Design, where you've been teaching speculative and critical design classes to the Ford Foundation—you were its inaugural new media art research fellow for Creativity and Free Expression—to being involved in various cohorts and labs for instance, the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, moving around so many different institutions, you get this great sense of being able to peer under the floorboards and look at how they work.
What's the biggest surprise for you as an artist going into those institutions, thinking of how that translates into your work as a leader of an institution?
Salome Asega:
You reading that to me just made me think, this past weekend I gave a talk at Yale's MFA graphic design program, which Nontsikelelo Mutiti runs, this incredible leader and someone after my talk asked me if I'm experiencing an occupational identity crisis because I've worked in so many spaces and spaces that are very different from each other.
[Laughter]
But I think to me, you know, I've always been drawn by certain ideas and I'm always looking for the spaces that can hold those ideas so I don't think of myself as a title or an occupation, but I think of the work I do as being driven by questions.
Charlotte Burns:
Having seen institutions from the inside out, I'm sure there are things you can see where things are moving productively and effectively and where things get stuck.
Salome Asega:
I think in the last couple of years I've seen organizations start to consider how they embed care into working with artists directly, in a way that feels new. And so I'm seeing people edit and re-edit, for example, their applications, and the processes for selection, determining more clear criteria for how they worked with artists.
I think at some point it was a measure of success to have thousands and thousands of people apply to your open call or grant opportunity but really what I think that signals for me, and what I think it's starting to signal for other people, is that maybe we're not clear and our goal should be to not waste people's time, right?
And I'm also seeing opportunities that engage artists that are taking care of them or meeting them where they're at as full people in the world, you know? I love, for example, Abrons Arts Center has an artist residency program for artist parents, which I think is so beautiful, and I'm hoping to see more and more examples like that.
I think the pandemic was a moment to say, “What are we doing, and who are we doing it for? And how can we be doing this better?”
Charlotte Burns:
Is that what you think goes towards defining a good leader?
Salome Asega:
I sat in a workshop once where the facilitator was trying to get us to think about power. She asked everyone in the room to consider if they had a timer in front of them. By the end of our session, to think how many minutes did you rack up on your timer?
For me, leaders maybe don't have the most time racked up on their timers. I'm drawn to leaders who are strong and quiet. I've been mentored by a lot of listeners, and that's what I try to emulate in my own leadership now. I don't rush into decisions. I don't think I need to be the loudest person in the room. I'm a listener.
When I was at Ford Foundation, I was hired by Elizabeth Alexander when she was running the creativity and free expression program and I think she was that exact kind of leader who was attentive, looking around the room, would call on someone if they were quiet, because she knew that they were thinking, the gears were turning, and so she would pull them into the conversation.
And Margaret Morton ran Ford Foundation's creativity and free expression, and I would say very similar energy. That's such a beautiful way to lead, to make sure everyone's voice is included.
Charlotte Burns:
You've said that the north star of NEW INC, which was founded in 2013 as the first of its kind, is to think about the ways cultural practitioners can build sustainable careers. And when you were appointed director, you were overseeing a hundred creative entrepreneurs, 600 alumni, and a very large group of mentors through the years. Obviously, you've also taught at Parsons. What are the challenges and opportunities for that younger generation of cultural practitioners?
Salome Asega:
Both the young artists that I was teaching at Parsons and also the kind of emerging cultural leaders that I'm seeing now at NEW INC are all thinking about new ways of doing business.
They wanna know the rules, they wanna know how it's usually been done, how the game has been played. But they also wanna know where are the opportunities to break the rules, and not have to not have to operate under the status quo.
Many of the people that I'm seeing come into NEW INC are interested in solidarity economies. They're interested in cooperative models for organizing, for doing business. They're interested in worker-owned business models. And these are all things that we've started to introduce into our professional development program, which is exciting. And we have artists and thinkers like Caroline Woolard, who have been for a long time thinking about collective organizing and we have like people who are on the ground thinking about new economies in the program.
Charlotte Burns:
Can you describe what that would look like?
Salome Asega:
Yeah. For example, there's a project in our program right now called “Duty Free”, which is a graphic design studio where the graphic designers own part of the company. And for them, that kind of moves beyond a traditional model of graphic design, where the studio is led by kind of genius figure. And then everyone kind of reports to the head of the studio. And so now the studio is organized in a more horizontal fashion.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you think those same principles apply when you're working in labs? Recently you were selected to be part of the inaugural Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, which is organized by Theaster Gates with the Prada Group. What makes a lab work?
Salome Asega:
Yeah. I think the most successful labs are the ones that bring together people that are working across disciplines, across silos. With the Dorchester Lab, I love this lab, but it brings together creative technologists like me, a farmer like Yemi Amu. It brings people in fashion, in the arts, in graphic design, in food. An incredible mix of people who all have something to learn from each other.
And I think that's also what makes NEW INC successful is that you don't really know who you're sitting next to, but you all have this hunger to build something that is self-sustainable, that is your own vision. And in that process, you learn that you have things that you can learn from each other and provide each other.
Charlotte Burns:
I think a lot about that because there's so much premium placed on efficiency in our daily lives, especially in our professional lives. And then we can lose some of that friction that can be a helpful friction. How do you think about friction and efficiency in your work?
Salome Asega:
In terms of efficiency, I'm really mindful of my team's capacity to execute projects. I think we're highly ambitious and we're dreamers, but I do think about efficiency from the standpoint of what is the team capable of doing.
But in terms of creating the randomness, the chance encounter for our members, I feel like more is more is the way to go. I don't wanna restrict any, any potential there at all.
In the NEW INC program, I think we over-program intentionally because we want it to feel a bit like choose-your-own adventure. As you're popping in from different working groups or intensive workshops, you'll meet different people. And that's where I think the magic can happen. And I think more is more is beautiful. Abundance, right?
Charlotte Burns:
Yep. Abundance, maximalism.
Salome Asega:
Yes.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Maximal abundance. So you talked about the communal ethos. Those things often in corporate life are binaries at odds with one another. You're either entrepreneurial and therefore individualistic or you are communal and therefore part of a group think. Can you describe how you see those things?
Salome Asega:
I would say that even for more traditional business spaces, there is an understanding of community, right? There have always been these kinds of boys' clubs you enter and you know that you're in fellowship with other people that will become your future colleagues, that will be your references for future jobs, that'll get you in the door of the company.
Maybe why a program like NEW INC looks different or Dorchester Lab looks the way it does is that it's just not the traditional makeup of like a Y Combinator for example, right? NEW INC program is 79% BIPOC. It's 80% women and gender non-conforming folks. We don't look like a typical tech incubator and so we read as more of a ‘community space’, which we are but, I think that a lot of tech and business spaces have always understood community building as a tool for progressing in their individual careers. And I think we do too. We just maybe market it differently or talk about it differently.
Charlotte Burns:
I think that's really interesting because of course, you're right. The networks of power are long established and this is essentially just a self-consciously built new network of power, in essence. Which brings us onto technology, and groups of people who design technology.
[Musical interlude]
You said you're interested in building consentfull technology and I was listening to a talk you did with American Artist who was on last season's podcast, and you said, “Right now there's a group of cishet white men in Silicon Valley that are actively working to build a future for us without our consent. We are living in their imagination. And I'm very interested in leveraging the power of collective imagination to present counter futures.”
I love this idea of tackling the biases of technology and who's building it, and that's something you really tackle in your practice. Can you talk us through that?
Salome Asega:
Yeah, I am the niece to many computer scientists in my family. And whenever my family would get together, it was always common for one of my uncles to come and bring a computer and have us take it apart and put it back together. And he really wanted us at a young age to kind of build a literacy around technology and have us understand that this is a designed object. Someone thought that this should look like this and operate like this. And these were all choices that a person made.
Fast forward going to doing my MFA and designing technology at Parsons, I was like a kid in a candy store. I was instantly thrown back into playing with my uncle on the living room floor. I had access to all this like emerging equipment, the latest and greatest. I just felt like people outside of the program needed to know that all of this stuff was happening. And so I then started to implement a kind of participatory-design process to a lot of my projects just because it was like a hack for me. It was like a way to get the equipment out of the space into community and do workshops with people.
I think from there, I became really invested in design thinking as a potential approach for challenging what we were seeing in our technology landscape, and through our workshops people felt self-empowered to make aesthetic and technological decisions just like the people in Silicon Valley are doing. And so that for me was kind of great success of some of the early projects I was doing.
Charlotte Burns:
I was reading about your ongoing research project Possession, which explores the connections between VR and spirit possession in West African and Caribbean spiritual systems, which I love the sound of.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the underwater fortress?
Salome Asega:
In 2016, I was tapped to be part of a collective of seven women artists exploring Mami Wata as a complex figure, a femininity in Caribbean and West African spiritual systems.
The seven of us each produced projects that landed in a show also called MAMI Wata at the Knockdown Center. I was like playing with one of the first Oculus Dove kits, so this is early VR for this phase of VR. I was interested in researching Mami Wata, I was interested in all these like sculptures that I was finding of practitioners holding an orb-like figure over their heads. This is meant to represent the Orisha. It said that when the Orisha mounts the practitioner from the head, they get transported into the Orisha’s world and teleported. That reminded me of like the idea of putting on a headset and being transported into another world.
I made this first project, you put on the headset and you're standing on a beach and it's the palm trees are making soft ruffles in the wind and the water is like hitting your feet then the music starts to grow louder, and then you're pulled into the ocean, into the waves, and then you're brought all the way down into the ocean bed floor. And you start to see like piles of gold and jewelry and you're still moving and then you're at the door of a fortress and then it goes black.
And then you start to hear recordings I did with practitioners who've had the experience of being spiritually possessed by Mami Wata. So they're just kind of recounting their experiences of meeting her. Once their voices end, you're spit back out into a wave and you don't know if you're gonna get back up to air, but you eventually do.
Charlotte Burns:
I love this.
So your practice is really wide-ranging. From this project to the LEVEL UP[: The Real] Harlem Shake, the interactive video game to building a Monster truck, and the Iyapo Repository, I think on this idea of building new worlds. Obviously, POSSESSION is a project where it's an augmented reality, it's a virtual reality. But with the Iyapo Repository, the group is not only working to imagine new futures but also to physically build prototypes for them. And I really like that intersection of imagination, creation, and archiving.
Salome Asega:
Totally. So Iyapo Repository is a resource library that exists in a nondescript future and houses a collection of art and artifacts made by and for people of African descent.
The repository takes on an institutional fiction. We've named the repository after Lilith Iyapo, who's a central figure in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. In the novels, Lilith is the last human being that resembles people of our kind. And so taking on an institutional fiction, we wanted to name the library after a person, and so we pay homage to her.
The repository has four divisions, and each requires some level of participation to create. Divisions are manuscripts, art and artifacts, film, and rare media. We host these workshops in partnership with museums, universities, arts organizations where we'll invite a small group of people to play a card game with us. You'll get a card that describes the domain in which you're designing for, so maybe it's education, or the environment, or fashion. You’ll get an object card that signals some physical quality your future artifact must have. The participants draw their future artifact on this like official manuscript, and then those workshop drawings all get encased in acrylic and preserved in what we call the manuscript division.
From there, we'll take the drawings and then work to actually build the drawings into fully-functioning technological objects.
Charlotte Burns:
Can you tell us a little bit about the water suit?
Salome Asega:
Yes. The water suit, artifact 12. The person who drew that was thinking about her relationship to water and wanted to create a sensory suit that gives the wearer the calming sensation of being underwater. For her, she was thinking about the transatlantic slave trade, her own fear of water, a generational fear of water. We built this suit and it has these black cuffs at each one of the joints that have vibrator motors embedded that are synced to tidal patterns of the Atlantic Ocean. So you get this nice kind of undulating vibration along your body. There are all these water tubes that are pumping water around your limbs.
That was always the best part of doing Iyapo repository was that you would make something that came from someone's vision and then bring it back to them to see. And it was like always a “Oh my goodness!" moment! “I drew that! I invented that!”, was the sense most of our participants had.
Charlotte Burns:
I really love that and I love the idea of the suit. And I was reading about its healing capacities, not only for trauma but for people with dementia or Alzheimer's.
Through your practice, there's this real premium on inventiveness. How would you define creativity? Would inventiveness be a core part of it?
Salome Asega:
I think of inventiveness as maybe a nice symptom of creativity. I think, I hope, creativity doesn't have any deliverables. I think it's in the play and when your mind is just going and going that you're able to make, or you're able to see something that maybe you weren't before and maybe that's what leads to the next great idea.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
I watched a video in which you were speaking a kind of mantra. You said, “I'm creative, I'm powerful, I am loved.” Is that a mantra you use often and when do you feel those things the most?
Salome Asega:
Yeah. I should bring back that mantra.
Charlotte Burns:
Why did you drop it? I guess life got too busy.
Salome Asega:
Yeah. Life got busy.
[Laughter]
Yeah, I do feel creative. I feel creative every day. I think even in administrative work there's a lot of creative problem solving. And also when you're planning programs, you're bringing your curatorial, your editorial, thinking to all of that.
I feel creative every day, and I do feel loved. It's hard to remember and hold onto that. I think for many of us in the world we live in, it's so tough. But it's a thing that I need to, that's why I'm like, I should bring that mantra back. But it's a thing I need to remember each day. What was the last thing?
Charlotte Burns:
I am creative. I am powerful. I am loved.
How do you think about power?
Salome Asega:
Power for me, I think, was always a process of self-reflection and self-improvement. It was power, I guess, as measured against myself.
Can I outrun maybe the other parts of myself that are saying you can't do it? And when I can beat those other parts of myself I feel victorious. We all hear those voices every day that tell us, “You can't do it. It's too hard, don't bother.” And I think when you can get past that, I know for myself, I feel powerful.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you get past that?
Salome Asega:
Oof. I think, taking the first step. It's gonna be hard. I think acknowledging when it feels hard, it's gonna be hard. Just take the first step and then take the second step, and then all of a sudden you're walking. But it's just taking the first step.
I'll tell you a secret. I can procrastinate. I can procrastinate a little bit and it's be…
Charlotte Burns:
I’m not sure I believe that when I look at this list of things you do…
[Laughter]
Salome Asega:
…But I think that's a, that's fear-based when you're just like, I don't know if I can get it done. But I think, yeah, just taking the first step, as difficult as it may feel, then you're in a groove then after that.
Charlotte Burns:
When you say it's fear-based, are you afraid of not being able to do things, of failing?
Salome Asega:
Absolutely. I think that's normal. I think a lot of us feel that.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, but I wonder who it is. You face inward and outward all the time, in the work that you do, plural. And so I'm imagining that's multifaceted; there's different layers of fear, I'm imagining, within that because you have different responsibilities.
Salome Asega:
I think the fear that I am most afraid of is the fear that I don't meet my own expectations for what work can be. That's always the hardest one, right? When you have a certain vision for projects. And yeah, just because of whatever constraints you can't get there. That can be a difficult kind of failure. That is not even it's a failure out of your control sometimes, even. It’s like a let go, let flow. What it is is what it needed to be sometimes.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, it's another step.
You've talked about how you were inspired by Xenobia Bailey, the designer, fiber artist, and industrial design graduate of Pratt [Institute], who questions this idea of the professionalization of design instead of focusing on the things that we do every day.
To what extent can creative practitioners that you are working with day in and day out disrupt the technology that we have by which, I mean we're at this stage with technology where the algorithms are predictive and they're based on everything that's ever happened. And the possible outcomes of things get smaller and smaller because the forecasts are only ever based on things that have gone before.
Is there a way that can change, do you think, on a large scale now?
Salome Asega:
It is a bit difficult to say, honestly. I feel like the cat's outta the bag with a lot of this stuff, and it's in wide use already. But I think what role artists have is in narrativizing, like, what's happening. I don't think a lot of people know, because it's moving all so quickly.
Because I don't wanna be stuck in the doom and gloom of all of this, right? I think there are probably opportunities for algorithms, artificial intelligence to do good things.
That's also maybe an area where artists can help. Just show us good examples.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, I'm thinking specifically of AI because things are moving very fast. How do you think about that, that the historical record that AI is built on, and how we build new futures when AI's built so often on what's past?
Salome Asega:
It's extremely dangerous especially since we don't have an accounting of a historical record that we all can agree on. And so when AI is projecting based on a past, my question is, “Whose past?” You know, like, “From where are you pulling?”
I am inspired by artists like Stephanie Dinkins who see that as an opportunity for change. It's widening the data sets and maybe if we include more of an accurate historical accounting, then the data sets that AI pulls from feel more honest, more true, represent us better. Yeah, I think that is also an opportunity there.
Charlotte Burns:
The big tech industry famously hasn't been that interested in the art world. Why is that, do you think? And is that changing from your perspective?
Salome Asega:
Actually, a lot of the big tech companies have some kind of arts and culture component to their work. So for example, Google has arts and culture. For the big tech companies, there was always some acknowledgment that creative thinking, arts thinking, helped find the gaps in their products right? Or helped them see things differently. And that kind of investment has always been there.
At some point, I thought Big Tech would become major players in arts funding. I think they're still very visible, but they haven't overturned traditional arts philanthropy.
Charlotte Burns:
Why not, do you think? Is that because it's an industry that sees itself as creative?
Salome Asega:
Maybe it's a mix of things. I think there isn't like, from my experiences in partnerships, there isn't always like a strategy for giving. So that could be one thing. And then also the other is, a lot of the support comes through marketing departments, and so it can sometimes feel like the partnership is there as like a storytelling opportunity for the tech company, as opposed to a strategy for philanthropy.
Charlotte Burns:
What technologies are inspiring you in your own practice right now? Less as leader of NEW INC and more as your artist hat on?
Salome Asega:
I'm a big fan of augmented reality still. I think since the Pokemon Go moment, it felt like a really… Do you play Pokemon Go?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. And my daughter loves it too now. But I think I like it more than her.
[Laughter]
Salome Asega:
I loved Pokemon Go because it got people out in the street playing with their phones and playing with each other. I remember catching a Pokemon before getting on a train to go to work, and someone knew exactly what I was doing and came over and laughed and then we like looked at each other's apps to see what we'd both collected in the neighborhood so far.
Yeah, I just would love to see more augmented reality projects like that, that got people outside and just like rediscovering their cities or their neighborhoods again, and meeting their neighbors.
So I've done a couple small AR projects, but I think that's like where I wanna dig in some more next.
Charlotte Burns:
What is it that you want to do? Do you have ambitions to remain in institutions and keep leading in that sense? Separately, I guess, is your ambitions for your practice?
Salome Asega:
I think my overall ambition is to find a way to marry my personal practice and the institutional work I do. I don't see myself dropping anyone, anytime soon. And so I need to find a way to build the bridge, in a way that feels seamless and that they're supporting each other.
So I've had ideas for way down the road, maybe starting a space of my own, that in part is like a studio space for my practice. But there's so much time.
I'm getting like my Ph.D. in non-arts nonprofit management right now by just doing. I'm a sponge. I'm learning a lot, under great leadership too. And so, I think that's where I'll be for a little bit longer.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
The show is a ‘what if’ show. So what if you were building your own institution, what would it look like?
Salome Asega:
It would be in Las Vegas, I think. I don't know if I can claim that without knowing what it is yet, but…
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
You can. Of course, you can.
Salome Asega:
…I think I've learned so much in New York since I moved here in 2007 that I'm ready to do this somewhere in the southwest. And I think my hometown of Vegas makes the most sense. But I would, I'd wanna start a space that is a residency program that is a public arts... I think I wanna start a space that supports artists in doing their first public art commissions, or projects.
So I think I'd like to create something like that in my hometown.
Charlotte Burns:
What was it like growing up in Vegas?
Salome Asega:
It's a strange place.
[Laughter]
I love my hometown. I grew up on what felt like the edge of the city so we just had desert, like in our backyard, and we'd see all kinds of desert wildlife. And then it was very normal at the same time for us to go to the Las Vegas strip for like back-to-school shopping. So I had the kind of high/low life of driving by the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas and then going back and seeing geckos in my backyard.
Charlotte Burns:
I love that.
Is there a big tech community in Vegas that you could plug into?
Salome Asega:
Not yet, but it's slowly…People are seeing it in the same way that they've seen Austin as like a potential outpost for tech companies. I think it’s much more affordable to do business in Vegas. And so it’s not quite there yet, but I think it'll come in the next couple years.
Charlotte Burns:
To what extent do you think about like investment in that? And I'm saying that because as a leader of NEW INC, you think about that; you just expanded Demo 2023 where artistic and technical creators' work was on display for viewers and investors alike, and you expanded that. That used to be an evening and then it became a three-day event with talks and performances.
Was that successful from that point of view of bringing investors in? How do you figure out which investors to target? How important a metric is that for the success of that kind of event?
Salome Asega:
We've had to widen our definitions for who can be an investor. And so yes, there are some more traditional kind of like VC investor types that attend Demo but then we're also thinking about curators and arts funders and education directors at museums. We're thinking about a whole suite of people who can help land the projects in their next home for presentation.
That to me is like the critical part of doing this program. The NEW INC members have spent a year with us, and this is the exclamation mark to their NEW INC cohort years, like really presenting their work publicly. And that audience needs to be made up of not only their peers but also people who can help propel them into whatever the next chapter of their careers will be.
Charlotte Burns:
I had a couple of ‘what ifs’ for you.
What is the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning and the one that keeps you awake at night?
Salome Asega:
I think the ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night is the, probably like a “what if I don't respond to that email?”
[Laughter]
It's terrible how much emailing has crept into my dreams recently.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you get out of bed and reply to the email?
Salome Asega:
No. I only respond to emails in the working day.
Charlotte Burns:
That's good. Boundaries.
Salome Asega:
It’s hard.
Charlotte Burns:
And what's the one that gets you up in the morning?
Salome Asega:
Probably “what if I make this introduction?” I really love connecting people and also connecting like our program to potential partners and finding an alignment. So my favorite emails are the ones to send that are like, “Let's get a coffee, let's connect, let me learn more about your work.” I get all of those done early in the morning because they're exciting to write.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, get them out there. They're the ones that get you out of bed.
And so you've said that your work starts with getting people to the table. What if you could get anyone to the table? Who would be at your dream table?
Salome Asega:
I would have my grandfather at the table. I never met my grandfather, but he had a very rich archiving practice. He took photos. He was like the only person in his neighborhood, in Addis, I think, with a camera. And so he would document the neighborhood and I feel like I inherited some things from him.
I would love to have like my fifth-grade teacher at the table too. Someone who invested in me early, saw that I had drive and really fed into it, Mrs. Stevenson. Being a teacher is such a thankless job because you don't always know where the people you support end up. And she doesn't know where I am, so I need to go back and talk to her.
Charlotte Burns:
I think this is another email you need to send.
Salome Asega:
Yeah.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
So is it a table of three or are you gonna bring anyone else?
Salome Asega:
I'm gonna bring my dog Romy because everyone loves a dog at the party.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, that's a great call. So nice and intimate with a pet for entertainment.
You are reimagining institutions. What if we could reimagine institutions? We've talked about your institution, but what would you do if you could say, “Okay, let's fix the problem of institutions.”
Salome Asega:
Funding is up there. It's so hard to envision a new model that doesn’t again have us dependent on someone making decisions for the field.
Charlotte Burns:
Is it possible to separate money from governance?
Salome Asega:
I don't think so. I don't. I think that the distribution of money always requires some kind of facilitation and that's a very difficult place to be. Because how do you make decisions? But maybe it's, maybe there's some kind of structure in which people are always cycling in and out and it's always peer-led. I don't know. That kind of “for us, by us” model.
Charlotte Burns:
How closely would you fund this institution with business products? I'm thinking here of work you've done around prototypes and video games. Would the sale of things like that fund the institution or would you keep those separate?
Salome Asega:
Yeah, I think so. I'm definitely interested in earned income opportunities for arts organizations. But yeah, figuring out what that is is like the big question.
You still want it to be tied to mission. When NEW INC was first founded, there was an initial interest in investing in some of the projects that were part of the program and then eventually maybe seeing if one of the products or services became like the next big tech thing, then the museum would see a return on investment.
But I think that felt a little confusing because we also see museums commission artists’ first projects, and then sometimes those projects go on to sell for a lot, and museums never ask for a cut. A museum would never do that with a commissioned project. Why would we do that with NEW INC?
But there is a boundary that's being tested. I think we need arts organizations, if they wanna be self-sustaining, they'll need to figure out what are the things that they're willing to change about their operations? The things that maybe used to feel uncomfortable, like maybe we need to just test right now and find out if they truly are uncomfortable. Because how we're operating right now is just, it's not working for everyone. We know it's not working.
Charlotte Burns:
There's just degrees of discomfort too and ultimately if, like you were saying, wherever the money comes from, there's a degree of discomfort, which it's kind of a scale and in a way and rethinking it also probably isn't easy and probably won't work at first.
Salome Asega:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
Okay, so I'm gonna ask you a ‘what if.’ You've said, “I hope our audience leaves knowing the futures that we want to live in are ever present and near. There are creative people working quickly around us to realize a world that centers on sustainability, inventiveness, collectivism, and culture.”
What if people did leave knowing that? How would that change things?
Salome Asega:
Wouldn't that be a better world to live in?
Charlotte Burns:
I agree.
[Laughter]
Salome Asega:
I don't know. I think if we all believe that, that's like…have you seen those memes of like if X happened, how the world would advance. It's like flying cars and like lush green scenery and I think we would live in that meme where it just like the future would be so real. We would get so much farther in all our like ideations of what a potential future could look like. They would just be realized because we are operating from the belief of care for each other, for the collective. I hope. Maybe that's the mantra I need to bring back.
Charlotte Burns:
What is the mantra? What if you could make up your new mantra right now on a podcast, what would it be? No pressure.
[Laughter]
Salome Asega:
Oh my goodness. I can't do that.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:I think it's good. It is good. We've discussed boundaries. It's good to have them.
[Laughter]
Thank you so much, Salome, for joining me. This has been such an enjoyable and interesting conversation. It's really been a pleasure.
Salome Asega:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to listening back to this.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns: A huge thanks to Salome Asega. Next time, we’ll be talking to Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, the president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation.
Hoor Al Qasimi: I think what has happened with Sharjah Biennial is that we've opened up the space for many histories to be written and I do talk about like South South conversation. It doesn't mean that the West is excluded, but it just means it's a different viewpoint or a different angle to perceive things.
Charlotte Burns: This is a great conversation. Join us for it next time on The Art World: What If…?!
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.