#46 Jérôme Pantalacci

In this episode of The Art Bystander Podcast, I speak with Jérôme Pantalacci, founder and director of Art-o-rama in Marseille.

At the end of August, I will travel to Marseille for Art-o-rama, a fair that has developed one of the most distinctive identities on the European art calendar. Founded by Jérôme in 2007, Art-o-rama has become known for its concentrated scale, its commitment to emerging galleries and artists, and its willingness to give space to presentations that are more experimental, specific and ambitious than the conventional art-fair booth.

Held at La Friche la Belle de Mai, a former tobacco factory transformed into a major cultural complex, the fair is deeply connected to Marseille itself. The city’s position between Europe, North Africa and the wider Mediterranean gives it a cultural intensity that feels markedly different from the established art capitals. Marseille is layered, contradictory, international and resistant to easy definition, and Art-o-rama has grown from that context rather than attempting to impose a standardised global model upon it.

In our conversation, Jérôme and I discuss how the fair began, what it means to build an international contemporary-art platform outside the traditional centres of market power, and how Art-o-rama has maintained its independence and curatorial character as it has grown.

We also speak about the challenges facing younger galleries, the changing expectations placed on art fairs, the importance of discovery, and the tension between experimentation and commercial reality. What does a smaller fair make possible that a larger one cannot? How can a fair remain relevant without becoming predictable? And what can Marseille teach us about the future geography of the art world?

As I prepare to visit Art-o-rama later this month, this conversation offers an introduction not only to the fair, but to the ideas, relationships and local conditions that have shaped it over almost two decades.

This is a conversation about Marseille, independence, risk, discovery and the future of the contemporary art fair.

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