On the third day, I traded a cassette tape for a box of antidepressants.

The tape had been my grandfather's. I don't know what's on it (it was unmarked) — I saved it from being donated when his apartment was emptied to be sold after his death, and I never once played it. I had it laying around in my room with other tapes, deciding what to do with it, and then I gave it away to a stranger at an art fair for a box of antidepressants with exactly one pill left inside. I found out afterward, standing at the wall, that a few trades earlier, someone had handed it over in exchange for a kid's drawing, and that the very first object, starting out the whole chain, was a ship's prism. A woman I'd never met (who had asked if I wanted to trade my skateboard the day before) took a polaroid of my exchange and pinned it to a wall already covered in other people's trades. Because it happened on day three and not the last day, I still had a full day left at the fair afterward — long enough to walk past that wall again once the photo had developed, long enough to see it fully formed, and long enough to see the polaroid of who had walked off with my grandfather's tape.

I spent the days around that trade mostly watching. Watching galleries and their booths, watching panels argue and discuss what art is worth and who gets to decide, watching the eccentric and interesting people, watching a fair that kept insisting, in every possible way, that it was building something different from the international art world's usual model. Riga Contemporary is small. It's regional. It was building connections and a community. Everyone who spoke there seemed to agree that was the point.

I wanted to find out if they were right.

01 — The PitchThe Argument the Fair Was Making

Riga Contemporary is only in its second year, held at Hanzas Perons, an old railway warehouse turned into an exhibition space. It's a strange, fitting location — an industrial building repurposed for something it was never built for, which is more or less the fair's whole pitch. Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, the local institution that runs it, has said openly that the goal isn't to compete with the big international fairs but to build what they call a lasting ecosystem in a region where creative energy has outpaced the infrastructure. In plain terms: this region has no shortage of talent, just a shortage of galleries, collectors, and money needed to sustain it. The fair is supposed to help close that gap. Kim? has also been explicit that this is meant to happen through collaboration rather than competition: deliberately low participation fees, free entry for visitors, and a stated priority on cultural exchange and knowledge-sharing over the usual commercial gatekeeping of an international trade fair.

That's a big claim for a fair with around forty galleries in a warehouse. So over four days, I tried to integrate myself in its atmosphere — to experience all four days within its walls, from its opening to its public program, hearing and seeing what these speakers (international and regional), from artists, to art directors of renowned and new institutions, to collectors and even established publication writers, had to say about the state of the art world and the importance of the art fair.

"In plain terms: this region has no shortage of talent, just a shortage of galleries, collectors, and money needed to sustain it."

02 — On the FloorThe Galleries: Local and International in the Same Room

Four galleries stuck with me. Kim?, the host institution, representing the local, small-scale end of things. The Gallery, all the way from New York, representing the kind of international art-world presence Riga is trying to attract. Gattopardo, somewhere in between — smaller, international, clearly there because a fair like this gave them a reason to be — and Margot Samel, again from New York, presenting a more traditional look.

Putting a New York gallery in the same warehouse as a homegrown Latvian one is exactly the kind of "regional meets international" moment the fair is built around. It's also where I made my trade. The Gallery was running a conceptual piece where visitors exchanged an object of their own for something already on display. I gave up my late grandfather's cassette tape, a tape I'd never actually listened to, and got back a box of antidepressants that had been traded for a kid's drawing. It wasn't really about value in any normal sense — it was about the fact that a stranger from New York and a student from Riga could stand at the same table and swap something, no price attached, just a compelling enough story attached to the object for them to accept the trade. Small as it was, that's a version of the dialogue between emerging and established galleries the fair claims to be building. Whether one trade proves anything about the whole model is a fair question — but it's the same question the fair itself is asking on a much bigger scale.

03 — The ProgrammeWhat the Panels Kept Repeating

Riga Contemporary's public program ran two full days of talks alongside the fair, and a few ideas came up multiple times, in totally different panels, from totally different speakers.

The first was trust. The panel on private foundations pointed out that public arts funding has been shrinking, and private money — foundations like Delfina in London or The TAAD Foundation in Lithuania — has stepped in specifically to support artists who aren't yet commercially safe bets. The galleries panel used almost the same language, describing representing an artist as a responsibility built on trust and communication, not just a business deal. Nobody used the word "regional" in that sentence, but it was clearly what they meant: smaller, slower, more personal relationships instead of a transaction-first market.

The second was immediacy, and the discomfort with it. The Art & Tech presentations — especially the one from Darius Vizbaras, CEO of Kosmos Theatre — described "phygital" work as being physically present while also digitally extended, and it was honest about the trade-off: physical presence gives you immersive attention and a kind of proof that you were really there, while digital access gives you convenience and speed but fractures your attention. There is no clear solution yet, but through experimentation there may be a way to combine the two without dismissing either.

The digital-ownership keynote made a similar point from a different angle. Owning art now often means holding a record of a transaction rather than an actual object, and entire online art markets now run day and night, decentralized, driven partly by cryptocurrency — CryptoPunks alone are worth roughly $300 million in total, about $55,000 per "punk." Nobody on stage said this was bad. Nobody even argued that AI art was bad — the general agreement was that it's becoming a tool, similar to photography. But almost everyone cycled back to the idea that something gets lost when everything moves fast, and that collecting, making, or exhibiting art works better as a slower "journey" than as a quick purchase.

I saw that idea play out literally at the trade wall: the box I walked away with had been traded off for a kid's drawing, seen and examined by the crowd of the fair, then it became mine. Nobody planned that chain. It just accumulated, one slow trade at a time.

The third theme was a little more uncomfortable, and it came from the artists themselves rather than the institutions. One artist-perspective panel included the phrase "fuck professionalism," scrawled almost like a rebellion against everything the other panels were describing so smoothly. Artists talked about how exhausting it is to build a team and stay independent, about the isolating feeling of everyone — critics, collectors, the public — wanting to weigh in on your work at once. It was a useful reality check. The fair's institutional pitch is that regional, trust-based, slow models protect artists. The artists on stage suggested that even a good model is still hard to live inside.

04 — The VerdictSo, Does the Small Fair Win the Big Argument?

I don't think Riga Contemporary fully proved its case in four days, and I'm not sure it could. But I don't think it failed. The galleries did share a room in a way that felt genuine rather than performative. The panels agreed with each other often enough that it didn't feel like a coincidence: trust, community, and the discomfort with speed clearly aren't just marketing language here — they're what the people actually running this part of the art world are worried about. And the artists, to their credit, didn't just repeat the institutional talking points back at us.

What I keep coming back to is that trade, and everything that had already happened to that box before it reached me. Unlike most of what got exchanged that day, I didn't lose track of mine — I walked past the wall again the next day and saw the photo fully developed, saw exactly who my grandfather's tape had gone home with. I still don't know what was recorded on it, and now I never will. But I know it didn't disappear into nothing; it became a photograph on a wall in a warehouse in Riga, held by someone I'll probably never see again — one link in a chain that started with a ship's prism, passed through a kid's drawing and a box with a single pill left in it, before it reached me.

"Value doesn't have to mean price, and something built on trust between strangers can still be worth doing — even at a small, regional, slightly warehouse-shaped scale."

Riga Contemporary was built as a fair model made for the public, as much as for the interest of galleries and collectors — to exchange and create meaningful connections in a more intimate setting, rather than at the giant international fairs and biennales.