"This is how we allow everyone to buy works of art and see them in museums." Francesco Bellanca, CEO of Feral Horses, speaks.

A group of entrepreneurs under 25, Italians Francesco Bellanca and Christian De Martin and Frenchwoman Lise Arlot, founded in spring 2017 the startup Feral Horses, a platform that offers everyone the opportunity to become co-owners of works of art that would normally have high economic barriers. Selected by the Financial Times and Google as one of Europe’s “Top 100 digital pioneers,” Feral Horses proposes an innovative model for the promotion and enhancement of cultural heritage from an international perspective: the platform deals with the online sale of shares of works of art, placed on the market at a fixed price. The works, once purchased, are first loaned to museums where everyone can see them, and then investors are given the opportunity to conduct buy and sell transactions on the works themselves. To date, 2,600 users have registered on the platform and 18 works have been sold in co-ownership, and at present Feral Horses is the only company that offers a business model based on selling works in shares followed by lending them to museums. The company is based in London. We spoke with Francesco Bellanca, CEO of Feral Horses (from Livorno, born in 1994, a BA from the University of Greenwich and an MA from King’s College London) and got to know how the project came about, and how it works in detail. Interview by Federico Giannini and Ilaria Baratta.

The Feral Horseslogo

Francesco Bellanca

FSA. How did the idea for Feral Horses come about?
The idea was born from an observation that Lise Arlot, Christian De Martin and I matured during university: that is, we find ourselves in a system in which we do not have access to art, both from an economic point of view (for the purchase of works that we would like to have, or at least own in part), and from a point of view of contacts, that is, we do not have access to a community of people within the art ecosystem. So we started looking at co-ownership models that were already extended to different assets or different types of properties, and we tried to start thinking about possible co-ownership models for art. The idea was born that way, and over the last year and a half we’ve been trying to figure out how best to structure the offer for people who want to take a piece of an artwork and be part of a community.

How does the Feral Horses platform work in detail? What are the mechanisms behind it?
Legally we talk about co-ownership, otherwise there is a process of selection of works that is done by us together with an external board (we try to understand how relevant the work itself is to our user base, both in relation to the subject matter itself that the work deals with), then we proceed with a broader analysis of the artist’s career, which is used to define the pricing model together with the external collaborators and the seller (be it a gallery, a collector or the artist himself). Next, the analysis involves museum institutions: we propose the works on loan to museums, institutes, public and private foundations. When we propose the work on the platform, and then when we propose the work for sale in shares, in shares, we already define the first step of a museum path. The work has a sale period that can last from two to eight to nine months, during which the work cannot be sold elsewhere. At the end of the campaign, if the work reaches the sales target, then it is purchased; if not, there is a refund, a reimbursement for everyone who participated. If the work is sold, a museum path starts, the first step of which, as mentioned, is defined before the sale so that people are told where the work will end up and where they can see it for the first time: this is a loan that lasts from five to ten years. At the end of the museum tour, the work is sold again, and this sale can be public or private, with careful consideration of cost-benefit ratios for users. Proceeds from the sale are then divided proportionally among all shareholders.

The home page of Feral Horses

Underlying the platform is also a selection of works. What are the criteria that define this selection? Are you interested only in contemporary or also in ancient art?
The selection process is quite complex and touches on three areas: the first is the topic covered, which is an important factor for us because by taking works and trying to bring them back into the public domain by having hundreds if not thousands of people have co-ownership of them, the importance of the topic covered becomes important, and we have many methodologies of analysis (for example, investigating trends in Google conversations or on social) to understand the relevance of a subject. A second area is career analysis or evaluation of the artist’s evolution in the market, which in the case of contemporary art takes into account past sales, exposure, qualitative value factors, analysis done by advisors and experts who have spoken on the artist: we acquire all this information and try to translate it into data, drawing up rankings. The third and final area is the institution: if we cannot find any institution that has the willingness to accept the work, we are stuck, since part of our proposal is to offer people the opportunity to go to the museum and see works that are also theirs. The selection process then also takes price into consideration, not because of an idea that price equals quality, but because of a discourse of the relationship between the user and the work: if I propose a 500-euro work and make five hundred quotas of one euro each, the base does not understand the motivations for participating with a one-euro quota. Our premise is different: the need is to try to bring into the public domain works that have a fairly high monetary barrier of entry for those who want to purchase works. We want to create accessibility for works that normally many people would not have access to. Usually the minimum target we propose is 80-90,000 euros, but it is neither fixed nor strong, it is just to have a minimum idea, already tested with our users, from which the thing becomes interesting. As for the type of works we deal with, today we work only on contemporary: this is related to the possibility of working with artists who share with us a broader vision of the market. This is an idea of active participation of the artist in the path of Feral Horses. Of course, we have also received many offers from dealers of the modern, on which we are reflecting: we would like to give people also the possibility of being co-owners of works that are not necessarily contemporary, in these cases of course the path would become longer (think of the processes of verification on ancient art works), and for us it is a matter of understanding when the time will come to make this transition as well.

Polaroid images of some of the co-owners

For now, how are the public and insiders responding to the idea of Feral Horses?
In a very positive way. The way we tell and try to model our working framework has impacted the response, because it has made our users ask us that they want to be part of a community, to be part of the art ecosystem, to help them connect to this ecosystem by making their lives easier. And we make them co-owners of artworks: with this system, the whole art market is actually opening doors for us, because museums need to be more and more relevant within a world that is changing fast and institutions have remained at backward frameworks. And, for them, acquiring co-owned works becomes interesting because it is based on a participatory aspect. For the sellers, it is interesting because it becomes a way of broadening the seller’s potential market, and also creating a base of people who support the artist and love the work, which is why we are trying to weave always positive interactions with all the different players in the market. We don’t want to be an alternative to the gallery: we say that if a person buys five thousand euros of works a year, then why not ask that same person, for example, for 150 euros more to spend on co-ownership of artworks? We, in essence, are trying to expand the market, not to be a competitor to other existing players. And this aspect becomes interesting for the market itself.

The idea of Feral Horses was developed in England: would you be able to imagine a similar idea developed, however, in Italy, or is there still no potential for such a project in our country?
Actually, in our platform many users are Italian, and some of the latest operations we have been following have turned the spotlight on the Italian market: there are even several Italian users who have asked, for example, to be able to give shares for Christmas or birthdays. What we are seeing is that in Italy there is so much desire to be and to have an active role within the cultural heritage, and that there are actually very few ways to do it. As soon as you give a chance to a market that maybe has less deep pockets than in England (but this is not important for the purpose of our project), the market becomes very interesting. Then, in Italy there are higher technological barriers, you need to provide much more customer care, but there is also a lot of will. I believe that the Italian base is ready for solutions of this kind: however, there is a need to be careful because you may be a bit behind in terms of technological literacy, but this problem if handled well does not create major impediments.

What will be the next phases of the project? How do you envision it in the short and long term?
Our project to date is through the creation of a community, the largest in the world, of art co-owners. In the next year and a half we will continue to expand in Europe and work to open in America. The goal is to listen to the users and try to understand what they want from the community: buying a share of a work is a gesture, a passage, and we are trying to understand from the users what more they want once they become part of the community. So we’re doing workshops and gallery tours in London with users: once we’ve done that, the next steps will depend on the responses we’ve had so far. Basically, we will move toward the focuses that the market and the grassroots will indicate to us. But right now the priority is to listen to users, to create community, and to make sure that those people who might not normally have been able to be part of the art system today can be part of it instead.

One last question, which everyone has probably asked you: why did you decide to call this project “Feral Horses”?
“Feral” is a word that we loved, because in British English it has a very specific meaning and indicates those horses that are born free, are put into captivity, and then are set free again. We liked the idea of this free-captivity-free course so much and we couldn’t translate it ... but then we thought about “feral horses” because, actually, from an ideological point of view, that was kind of what we were trying to do with the art ecosystem: art is born as a demonstration of human creativity and the human spirit, and later on it gets tied up in market dynamics, which are often elitist and elitist. We in our small way are trying to broaden these dynamics by trying to make art free again.

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