Barcelona’s ‘Third Place’: Anna Floto on Community, Collaboration, and Art That Moves You
Anna Floto on co-founding 200CENT, making art interactive, and building community beyond the gallery walls.
Welcome to The Creative Ledger, where I share conversations with artists, patrons, gallerists, and cultural builders about how creative value really works.
Anna Floto is a British multidisciplinary artist and co-director of 200CENT, a Barcelona-based artist-run gallery dedicated to community, collaboration, and experimentation beyond traditional gallery formats. Her artist discourse explores the intersections of natural and social ecosystems through drawing, mark-making, painting, and participatory activations that often require public engagement to fully come alive.
After co-founding 200CENT, Anna completed a diploma in Studio Arts at Metàfora in Barcelona and briefly studied architecture at the University of Edinburgh. She has also participated in a two-month residency at Can Serrat in Catalunya and developed projects such as 12Hour Soup, a collaborative meal-centered activation, and Dinner with Familiar Strangers, which investigates the unseen social dynamics of everyday life.
In this conversation, we discuss Anna’s path into the art world, the founding of 200CENT as a “third place” for artists and audiences, and how she envisions sustainability, interactivity, and meaningful community impact shaping the next chapter of artist-run initiatives in Barcelona and beyond.
Can you take me back to the beginning? What first pulled you into the world of art and creative practice?
“I have always been drawn to making art, even as a child. But growing up in Cambridge, the path toward becoming an artist never really felt visible or tangible. Cambridge is such an academic city, completely shaped by the university. It is rooted in science and academia, and the art scene is not especially present. There is isnt even an art degree at Cambridge. The atmosphere is very much that you go to school, you go to university, you study something serious, and then you get a job. Becoming an artist felt like a random detour rather than a real option.
My parents were supportive of my creativity, but they were not part of the art world. My dad is a doctor, and while my mum is creative in her own way and very into horticulture and plants, the arts were never framed as a viable career. So even though I was always making work, I did not initially see it as something I could pursue fully.
That perspective shifted when I went to Chile in 2019 to reconnect with my dad’s side of the family. I happened to be there during the protests, and it was a formative experience. There was so much street art, murals, graffiti, performance, music, and it felt urgent. The streets became a space where truth was communicated visually and collectively. That was the first time I truly understood the social and political impact of art.
I ended up staying in Chile throughout the pandemic. With everything paused and so much uncertainty in the air, I began channeling my own political thoughts into my work. I started sharing it on Instagram, which became my first real platform. At the time, I had been planning to study architecture in Manchester, but after that experience, architecture no longer felt as compelling.
I found an art school in Spain and initially intended to come for just one year. But once I arrived in Barcelona, everything shifted again. Being surrounded by artists, musicians, and creative people made it feel possible. In my first year, I lived in a collective house with fifteen people. It was still during COVID, so we could not go out much, and collaborating became our way of connecting. I started working with musicians and filmmakers and experimenting across disciplines. In Barcelona, I felt like anything could be possible.”
What problem, or possibility, did you feel was missing in Barcelona’s art ecosystem that led you to co-found 200CENT?
“There was not necessarily a specific problem we were trying to solve. It happened more organically than that. My two co-founders and I were simply looking for a shared studio space. When we found this place, it felt unexpected. It was a house with studio space, but it also had the possibility of opening directly onto the street.
That potential stood out to us. It felt like such a rare opportunity. The idea of opening it to the public felt too interesting to ignore. At the time, there was a lot of construction on the street, but eventually it became pedestrianized, and now so many people walk past every day.
We started thinking about how we could use the space beyond ourselves. It could function as a platform, especially for friends and artists in our community who were looking for opportunities to exhibit their work. We were excited by the possibility of experimenting, of creating something flexible and collaborative.
It was less about identifying a gap in the art world and more about responding to circumstances. The space presented itself, and we asked ourselves how we could make the most of it.”
200CENT describes itself as a “third place.” What does that mean to you in practice, and how does that differ from a traditional commercial gallery model?
“I think for me, a third place is a space where people gather. It is not quite a gallery, and it is not quite a home. It exists somewhere in between. It is an intersection where things can happen, where conversations unfold, and where people come together around shared ideas.
Of course, we host exhibitions, and it is a space where artists can present their work and express their ideas. We try to activate each exhibition in some way, whether through public conversations with the artist or workshops that invite participation. We want the audience to engage rather than just observe.
There is also a more informal element. In the back, we have a space where people can sit, look through artists’ books, have a beer, and talk. To me, this is a third space that is constantly changing. It’s not this fixed thing.”
What does sustainability look like for an artist-run initiative in 2026? Does it mean profit, longevity, adaptability, or something more communal?
“It is challenging because we are a non-profit organization. We are not producing work in order to generate income that sustains the space, so we rely much more heavily on community. In many ways, the community is what keeps the space alive.
Friends help us install exhibitions. The people who buy work are often part of our extended network. If something unexpected happens, we have a group of people we can call on for support. That sense of shared investment is really how we sustain ourselves.
Our neighbors are also part of it, which feels very nice. The bar next door, for example, lends us equipment like lighting when we need it. For us, community is the way we’re sustainable.
“Our idea for 200CENT was about breaking down the boundary between public life and the art world.”
-Anna Floto
Our idea for 200CENT was about breaking down the boundary between public life and the art world, which can often feel elitist or closed off.”
Your projects like 12Hour Soup and La Oca invite participation rather than passive viewing. What draws you to interactivity as a central component of your work?
“As an artist, I am very interested in participation. I get bored easily, and if I already know exactly what is going to happen in my work. When I create something, I want to be surprised by it.
In some of my work, I leave pieces in public and allow them to be altered by social or environmental factors. It is similar to placing a rock on the beach. You know it will erode over time, but you do not know how quickly or in what way.
I have made small books where I sit on a bench and draw people walking past, then leave the book there to see what happens. Someone might flip through it, take it, ignore it. The reaction becomes part of the work. The 12-hour soup project came from a similar impulse, but it also responded to the experience of living in a city. We pass hundreds of people every day. We sit on the metro surrounded by strangers, yet we rarely interact. I wanted to create a situation where people could come together in a way that felt natural, not forced.
I put up posters around the city listing the ingredients of a soup. Each person could choose to bring one ingredient to the space between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. It was entirely based on chance. If no one brought anything, there would be no soup. I also had no control over when people would arrive. That surrender of control was central to the piece.
What ended up happening was that people from different parts of the city arrived with different ingredients and began cooking together. Conversations unfolded organically. It felt both normal and unusual at the same time. Sharing food is ordinary, yet in a city that can feel individualistic, it became something meaningful.
I remember a Catalan couple from Gràcia sharing soup with a man from Peru who had lived on the streets here for five years. They spoke about their different experiences of the city. There were conversations about music, about belonging. Those exchanges would not necessarily have happened otherwise.
The same thinking shaped La Oca. It was structured as a game, but to play it, you had to speak with strangers. The work only functioned through interaction. And it created friendships at the end of the day.”
If you could redefine how society measures the “worth” of art, beyond sales, prestige, or institutional validation, what would that look like?
“I was speaking about this earlier, but I think the art world is deeply shaped by reputation. It is not necessarily fair. So much depends on who made the artwork rather than the work itself. In art history, certain names become celebrated, and once that happens, everything they produce is automatically validated. For many people who engage with art at a surface level, those big names end up defining what art is.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if those names were stripped away, and we encountered works without knowing who made them. Where it is more about the actual art piece rather than who made it, it might create space for more emerging artists and give other people a platform to become well-known.
At the same time, it is difficult. Art is subjective. It is emotional and cultural. But I do think there needs to be more intentional effort to platform artists who have not historically had access to visibility. In our own way, that is something we try to address through our space.”
How do you decide who gets space, visibility, and programming time at 200CENT? What criteria matter most to you?
“In the beginning, our exhibitions were very community-based. We knew a lot of artists personally, so our first show was a group exhibition with around fifteen friends. It felt important to create a space where people who had never exhibited before could share their work publicly.
As the space became more established, we introduced open calls to make the process more accessible and transparent. Anyone could apply, and it was free. One of the key questions we asked was why they were interested in exhibiting specifically at 200CENT. That helped us understand whether their proposal aligned with our ethos, especially our focus on community and site-specific engagement.
For example, we hosted two artists from Lebanon who transformed the space into a pop-up Lebanese bakery. It was highly interactive and invited the public to participate. We have also worked with artists connected to local universities.
The mix of people is important to us. We often create group shows that bring together artists who applied through the open call, pairing them based on similarities within their discourses.”
When you imagine the next chapter of 200CENT, whether in Barcelona or beyond, what kind of impact do you hope it will have on the artists and communities it touches?
“I want to continue giving artists a platform to speak, but also to deepen our connection with the surrounding community. Creating opportunities for artists is central to what we do, but I am increasingly interested in expanding where and how those opportunities take place.
I would like to experiment with exhibitions in unconventional spaces. That could mean staging a show in a kebab shop, in a hospital, or in other everyday public environments. Even though our gallery is located on one of the busiest streets in the city, daily foot traffic does not necessarily translate into engagement. We might have hundreds of people at an opening, but after that, attendance becomes much quieter and more limited.”
