NFT Marketplace — Córdoba Provincial Collection

Out of the collection-digitisation work came a new ask: the province wanted to step into the world of blockchain. Not just mint a one-off NFT, but stand up a real marketplace — a channel to sell NFTs of the provincial artworks. We treated it as a separate project, with its own logic, and added an entrance to it from the existing digitisation site.

We wanted to build the marketplace and the pieces to sell in it, but honestly. Most of the collection is by artists who have died, and using their work without their families' authorisation opened a legal complexity the client didn't want to take on. Rather than force that path, we sought out two living Córdoba artists and made the whole thing with them, not about them.

The two artists' original works weren't a natural fit for the NFT aesthetic, so — with their sign-off — we intervened them. Every edit was a 3D re-creation in Blender: real interventions to turn each painting into something that made sense as an NFT. We talked each variation through with the artists, who approved and godparented them. Each gave us one work, and of each work we made three variations, so the platform ended up with six NFTs: a small, curated set, not a mass mint. The marketplace design was also handled by Darwoft's innovation team, leaning into the glossy, tactile storefront look that NFT marketplaces were using at the time.

The marketplace is live with those six NFTs, reachable from the provincial art site. What we'd underline for anyone taking this on is what we learned ourselves: the blockchain is the easy, boring part. The project stands or falls on the legal curation and on treating the artists as partners.