Why we founded WeAreEvents: The Artist Should Not Be the Last Person in the Room to Benefit

I founded We Are Events together with Renée (a wondeful woman I met during one of my exhibitions) because I was tired of watching artists create the value and then disappear from the story.

It happens.

A photographer makes the image everyone posts. A musician gives the evening its atmosphere. A designer builds the visual world. An artist lends a project the credibility no sponsorship deck could manufacture. Their work becomes the part people remember.

Then the event ends.

The brand keeps the content. The venue keeps the attention. The guests keep the photographs. And the artist is left chasing an invoice, asking for a credit or watching the work travel without them.

I did not want to become better at surviving that system. I wanted to build a different one.

That is why we founded WeAreEvents.

The idea may have begun with my own experience as an artist, but WeAreEvents became real through a team. Renée, Santiago and Eric each brought their own judgement, skills and way of seeing to it. They helped turn a personal frustration into something we could actually build and they continue to shape what the company stands for.

Not because the world needed another events company. It did not.

I founded it because I wanted to protect the thing that usually gets diluted first: the artist’s intention.

The problem is not money

I am not interested in romanticising the struggling artist.

Artists should make money. Good work deserves proper budgets. Brands, institutions and private partners can make ambitious cultural projects possible. Commerce is not the enemy of art.

The problem is what happens when the artist enters the room with the least power.

Too often, the creative person is expected to bring the idea, the emotional intelligence, the visual language and sometimes even the audience, while somebody else controls the budget, the rights and the final decision.

The artist is essential until it is time to discuss ownership.

WeAreEvents was created to change that balance.

We want artists involved early, not brought in at the end to decorate a finished concept. We want their names visible, their rights clear and their contribution treated as the centre of the project rather than an accessory to it.

Protection does not mean control for the sake of control. It means making sure the work can grow without being stripped of its origin.

An event should leave more than photographs of people holding drinks

There is no shortage of beautiful events.

There are immaculate tables, expensive flowers, carefully chosen guests and walls covered in logos. By the next morning, most of them have already begun to disappear.

I have never been interested in producing a room simply because the room can be filled.

The question is what the gathering makes possible.

Did two people meet who will build something together? Did a young artist gain access to a space that had previously been closed? Did a story reach the right audience? Did the project create work that can live beyond one evening?

For us, the event is rarely the end product. It is the point of ignition.

The photographs, films, conversations, exhibitions and collaborations that follow are often more important than the night itself. That is why the documentary eye sits at the heart of WeAreEvents. We are not there only to record what happened. We are there to understand what is worth carrying forward.

Doing good cannot be the paragraph at the bottom of the press release

The language of impact has become very easy to borrow.

Almost any project can be described as meaningful. Almost any campaign can attach itself to a cause. But real social value is not created by adding a charity logo after the guest list has been approved.

It begins with structure.

Who is paid? Who is invited? Who owns the work? Who is given access? Who gets to tell the story? Who benefits when the cameras are gone?

We founded WeAreEvents because we believe creative projects can do genuine good, but only when that intention is built into the project from the beginning.

A cause should not be used to make a brand look better. An artist should not be used to make a cause look more beautiful. And a community should not be reduced to the backdrop for somebody else’s campaign.

The relationship has to be honest.

The strongest projects create value in more than one direction. The artist is protected. The partner becomes part of something credible. The audience encounters work with substance. And someone who would normally remain outside the room is given a way in.

I wanted to build the company I needed as an artist

WeAreEvents is personal because it came from a personal frustration.

As a photographer, I know what it means to place your work into other people’s hands. An image can be copied in seconds. A concept can lose its author. Something intimate can become content before you have even understood what it means to you.

But I also know what happens when artists are trusted.

They take risks. They notice what others miss. They create the emotional centre of a project. They make people stop, feel and remember.

That kind of work needs more than applause. It needs protection, money, time and the right people around it.

Together with Renée, Santiago and Eric, WeAreEvents is our attempt to create those conditions.

A company that understands that artists are not suppliers of atmosphere. That doing good is not a marketing category. That an event should not be judged only by how it looked, but by what it changed.

I founded WeAreEvents to protect my own work, yes.

But also because we want the artists beside us to keep ownership of what makes them valuable.

And because we believe a room can do more than impress the people invited into it.

It can open a door for someone else.