Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028
Edited by Jens Hoffmann
Despacio and Dent-De-Leone, 2019
The bilingual publication Twenty Years of Despacio 2008–2028 marks the beginning, the end and a speculative decade ahead in the life of an art space in Central America. Despacio was started by Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero to give artists in the region an opportunity to think and act autonomously. Despacio is also the Spanish word for “slow” and for “slowness,” and although nothing at this venue was ever fast or too concerned with artistic careerism, this gallery helped shape an entire generation of practitioners—myself included.
The idea to start an art space came to Herrero in 2008, a
