“For numerous years, three of the four galleries were looking for new spaces that were larger and more functional in the Paris suburbs, where prices are more affordable and the spaces larger,” wrote two of the dealers at Komunuma, Fabienne Leclerc and Vincent Sator, over email.
Soon, they’ll be joined by an exhibition and residency program run by the private Fiminco Foundation, which funded the renovation of the four-building campus. One of the foundation’s founders, Gérald Azancot, is the president of Groupe Fiminco; a real estate company involved in major commercial and residential projects in Romainville.
The Fiminco Foundation’s marquee exhibition space, a former industrial boiler room with a towering interior, is slated to
open in January. The complex’s only new building, a storage and conservation facility for the local branch of France’s national network of contemporary art spaces (known as FRAC), will
launch in the fall of 2020.
Collectively, the dealers hope, Komunuma’s mix of programs will make it a destination, especially as the greater Paris region seeks to shore up activity in the capital’s suburbs. They foresee “a plurality of centers with multiple, distinct identities,” as Leclerc and Sator wrote in an email. “The development of Grand Paris will lead to a redistribution of the geography of contemporary art.”