Interview
"Digitisation is a vital step to safeguard cultural heritage"
María Paula Fernández is the co-founder at jpg.space and the Department of Decentralization. For this interview, we spoke to her about the history of NFTs and their potential for reshaping how we think about art and digital restitution.
By Lucy Rowan
Before we dive into the topic of NFTs and the digitisation of art, let’s go back to basics. Could you tell us what an NFT is and where NFTs originated?
In short, NFTS are just "smart contracts" - non-fungible assets, which means that you can divide them, and they are also immutable, so you can use them for anything that requires authentication. They are highly versatile and very programmable.
The history of NFTs traces back to 2014. The Monegraph prototype was created by artist Kevin McCoy and Technologist Anill Dash during one of the Rhizome seven-on-seven sessions. Monegraph allowed you to sell digital art, and certify the provenance and ownership with a transaction that was a registered on Namecoin. At the same time, other groups were also very interested in the idea of linking a digital object to a verifiable transaction that can prove its provenance. In Berlin, notably the team at Ascribe - Trent McConaghy, Masha McConaghy and their team, and artist Harm van den Dorpel, to name a few. The McConaghys were developing Ascribe... It was what we call a “project”, which is a company that has software to sell. It did not take off, but the experiments continued. This timeline has not been linear, there were lots of experiments happening simultaneously in different blockchain cities/hubs…
What is the potential of Web3? What does it mean for wider society?
Right now, on the mainstream side of things, Web3 is just a moniker that englobes everything from very expensive generative art to PFP NFTs and different funding, buying and trading platforms. For me, it means something a bit deeper. I have been in the Blockchain space since 2017. As an Argentinian, I became attracted to the promise of a technology capable of restoring some degree of self-sovereignty and access to your financial destiny and dignity. In Latin America, we are used to living in a period of constant crisis and a draining of our resources. Our systems have been broken, corrupted and mingled with for many decades. Blockchain enables decentralised autonomous organisations access to currency and different financial platforms to experiment with, especially those who maybe did not have access to a bank account because of credit scores or other structural issues. All of this has the potential to be incredibly transformative to societies in distress.
The term Web3, for context, was originally proposed by Gavin Wood as a technological stack, where every part of the stack was a decentralised, permissionless and trustless module without middlemen. That stack would enable a world computer allowing for any kind of software to be born on top of it. That sort of happened and didn't happen at the same time. Web3 has now hit the mainstream and become a buzzword, a marketing word.
In 2018, you founded the Department of Decentralisation (DoD), which is based in Berlin. Could you tell us more about what led you to create this and what does the DoD do?
I always have this “North Star” regarding anything that I'm building in Web3. I understand that cryptocurrency can be a life-saving technology, I feel the same about many technologies, but in the case of Latin America or Nigeria, which has been the main adopter of cryptocurrencies during the last full market, it is lifesaving. When I got into blockchain, nothing was really readable for me, it was very early. I was also observing Berlin as this hub with all of these established technical people, but there were no spaces for connection or discussing ideas together.
So we started a very simple project, and we got everyone on a Slack channel and we said, “OK, let's coordinate some kind of blockchain week like the other countries are doing because we're travelling around, getting burnt out because of all this travel when all the richness of knowledge, especially the technical knowledge, is here”.
After that, the Department of Decentralization was born. The main goal was to educate people about blockchain technology and what it enables. The second was creating a series of other educational events. All of our events were free and offered travel scholarships for hackers from across the world. The third was to dive deeper into blockchain art. Ruth Catlow was one of the first people we came into conversation with, in the context of writing a report on blockchain art. Currently, the Department of Decentralization is up and running smoothly, under new leadership since last year.
What do museums and other institutions think about NFTs? Is the perception changing?
Museums have NFTs on their radar, but they work at a slow pace sometimes. Last year, Buffalo AKG did a fantastic fundraiser, where they commissioned artists and editions of the works were acquired by the institution.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art came through with an acquisition and MOMA has had NFTs on display and hosted workshops too. Pompidou did my favourite acquisition of them all because it was very thoughtful regarding the history of NFT art. Other institutions are very advanced in their research, development and experimentation. Serpentine Galleries and HEK are at the forefront, of course.
There is no reason for the perception from the perspective of museums to be other than good. Beyond the hype, there is genuinely good art in the NFT world, and many talented people are experimenting with the potential of smart contracts as a medium. The people at Folia, for example, continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with smart contracts.
I think museums are quite up to date with what’s going on. They are navigating NFTs carefully. Big institutions have different timelines and procedures. Of course, museums take time to acquire different works - there are operational and legal aspects that we are not familiar with in the blockchain world.
Is there a particular museum or art institution that is leading the way when it comes to adopting NFTs?
Then there are Christie's and Sotheby's, who I applaud. Their main job is to make money, and they are doing a great job at that! NFT people crave the sense of legitimacy these two auction houses give them. Through launching Web3 products and marketplaces, they became the vehicles of legitimacy in the NFT world - at least for now. The most exciting stuff happening in the NFT world comes from these two institutions founded in the 1700s... They saw the opportunity and it's spectacular they took it. It was a big risk for them!
How possible is it to transfer cultural heritage into a fully digital format - and what are the pros and cons of doing so?
The thing about cultural heritage is that it is not just cultural, it is social. Sometimes it can't be reproduced, and that is what makes it so unique. But I do think digitisation is a vital step to safeguard cultural heritage. It is extremely important to create vaults that capture different moments in time that cannot be tampered with. People are using digital restitution to reclaim appropriated artworks from their culture that are in the hands of museums or collectors – in some cases, the object simply won’t be returned. People can take away your stuff whenever they want to. That’s going to happen time and time again. If you can preserve your knowledge in some way, then there's also a way for you to restore it.
Do you have an example of an object you helped to restitution digitally for a community?
I worked with the Circle of Plantation Artists in Congo (CATPC), Renzo Martens, and an organisation in the Netherlands called Human Activities. Together, we initiated the case for digital restitution of a statue of a Belgian mercenary that had been looted from the plantation community and was living in a museum in Virginia. The plantation had established a museum designed by OMA, which met all of the conditions for the artworks. So the CATPC asked the Virginia museum for a loan, which was declined. As a response, the CATPC organisations started thinking about NFTs and whether they could help generate a digital copy of the sculpture. Since the original sculpture was theirs, all they had to do was to transfer the meaning of the object; which will always remain with them, to digital reproduction.
When the museum heard their image of the sculpture was being used for this purpose, they claimed it belonged to them and filed legal action. Of course, we had worked with the CATPC to make sure the image could not be taken down - using the blockchain.
Later, together with the CATPC, we created a scheme whereby they could fundraise to buy back land that was decommissioned from Unilever, which would extend the plantation's domains. CATPC then released an NFT series, which featured this wooden sculpture and a beautiful illustration from one of the artists in the plantation circle. They had a lot of opinions on how they wanted the project to go - they wanted to have ownership of every process, so we made it possible for them to even deploy the smart contract. For this, first, we explained how to use Ethereum and set up wallets. Then we utilised different tools that when set up, allowed them to simply press a button and deploy.
So in short, CATPC launched their own NFT collection. They sold it, and the money went to them. We created ENS addresses for them so that people on the internet would recognise them as well, and it worked. From this exercise, I really understood that culture is social.
Within your work, you take macro technical concepts and funnel them down into projects that are much more micro/local and community-focused. How can we continue to make these often abstract concepts more accessible for local communities so that they can utilise them better?
That's a brilliant summary. Even after several years of therapy, I have not achieved that summary of what the hell it is I am doing *laughs*. I think “locality” also exists online, and that’s essential to remember when fostering “local circles”. There are two main reasons: Firstly, we need to access those who might not have the resources to travel. Some people simply live in very remote locations and need access to the community. Secondly, we need to take care of the environment - excessive travel is not good for this.
Affinity groups are extremely important and we need to try to create more events with those groups. For example, even if it's just a book club, a small initiative, people take so much away from it. Or the DAOWO Global Initiative Conference hosted by Ruth Catlow at the Goethe-Institut in February 2020 (DAOWO Global Initiative), which was such an incredible way to be all together in one place, learning about meaningful stuff. This sense of “togetherness” is vital. Anything that gives people substance - a place to talk and learn more is incredibly important. To exist as citizens not just in a physical space but online too.
María Paula Fernández
Originally from Argentina, María Paula Fernández is the co-founder at jpg.space, and the Department of Decentralization. She has been working in web3 since 2017, when she joined the Web3 Foundation as employee number three. She's worked and consulted for several of the most prominent blockchain projects. In 2018, she founded a grassroots organisation in Berlin, the Department of Decentralization, which hosts web3 hackathons, research projects and publications on art and technology. Her organisation's latest collaboration was a year-long project with Hito Steyerl, StrikeDAO, for which they built a quadratic voting app and presented a governance proposal for a German institution.
In early 2021, she started her own company alongside Sam Spike and Trent Elmore, jpg.space, a protocol that focuses on on-chain NFT curation.