Store Of The Week: Gambiarra

Gambiarra is the Brazilian word for the art of makeshift, improvising, creating what you need from what you have at your disposal. It is also the name of an art gallery creating a unique experience of Brazilian art on Mintbase. Gambiarra has over one hundred minters in their store, from musicians to visual artists, mixing photography, painting and digital art.

Gambiarra is composed of many different groups in the Brazilian art space: NFT artists Cryptoamigues (now CryptoEnzo) or Crypto Arte BR and Crypta Artists — who’ve been mainly minting on other chains such as Tezoes or DESO and are new to NEAR protocol — and traditional artists from Binaria: Contemporary Art Gallery, such as Rodrigo Cid aka the Philosopher, the founder of the project.

The project, named Gambiarra because of the traditional belief that the Brazilian people use creativity to deal with life’s problems ingeniously, started after the Brazucas NFT Exhibition on the Metaverse.

“Brazucas was a real success, and I had the intent to develop a long term project with Brazilian artists only. We felt the strength of Brazilian art and how much we could accomplish if the artists were together”, says the Philosopher.

The exhibition counted with more than 100 Brazilian artists and was curated by the Philosopher and Ghini, an artist who migrated her brushstrokes to the digital medium during the pandemic and just exhibited her work at NFT.NYC and Art Basel Miami week 2021.

Amongst their hundred artists, there is Cryptoquariux, who just won 1st place on the NEAR Metaverse Prize on visual art; Blu Wasem Simon, a truly complete artist and the creator of the art label Nomade; Numa, the elf beatmaker, who was just with us at our last Instagram live. There are also plenty of famous Brazilian street artists, such as Becopro, Dazo, and Bruno Miné, that are now bringing their art indoors — and online!

The gallery is collectively owned, so there are no default revenue or royalties set on the store — each one of the hundred minters can choose exactly how they structure their sales and all gallery-concerning decisions are made collectively.

They’ve recently worked on an exhibition on Cryptovoxels metaverse, about the different interpretations of the artists about what “Gambiarra” means, and then minted the Mintbase store for the event as a gallery NFT.

This can be done through 3XR, a project of Mintbase’s Product Lead Luís Freitas aka microchipgnu — each store gets a virtual gallery (yes, it works in VR!) that is its own multiplayer metaverse.

The virtual gallery powered by 3XR is one of the features making Mintbase the right platform for Gambiarra, together with split revenues and own storefront (=smart contract) and multiple minters. But, for the Philosopher, the main reason is being able to contribute to the ecosystem: “Mintbases listens to us and changes its features according to our needs, and we can develop projects together”.

Soon, they’ll be launching #MintbaseSunday, letting collectors purchase Gambiarra’s works for a fixed price on that day. They welcome the community to join their initiative and use their hashtag on Twitter to shake the art market.