3:16 minutes
Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video. It features a single shot of a vintage postcard depicting the Columbus Monument and the port of Barcelona, both of which are linked to colonial histories and historical trajectories. The sea is an unnaturally bright blue. In the foreground, the tram cars are painted in an unusually saturated shade of red. A crease in the postcard’s paper runs through the sky like a shadow, mocking the enduring certainty of Columbus’ gesture of dramatically pointing out toward the “New World.” In the film, Lagomarsino’s father tells a story about arriving in Europe from Argentina after being forced into exile by the illegal military regime that killed and disappeared thousands of Argentineans between 1976 and 1983 on a voiceover in measured, rhythmic Spanish. He sat on a suitcase, lit a cigarette, and resolved to forget about Argentina and all the fear and death he, his wife, and their young daughter had left behind. For the duration of a cigarette, it is a nostalgic, dispirited retelling of displacement. The work confronts the audience with this reality as it is linked to exile and to the loss of belonging and security. It captures the feeling of relief that comes with arriving after a long and uncertain journey and breathing the air of a foreign city for the first time in a place where you know you’ll have to survive.
Runo Lagomarsino’s installations, sculptures, and films provide alternative perspectives on historical, political, and cultural power dynamics. His work, which is concerned with how power relations have manifested in colonial contexts, calls hegemonic versions of history into question, particularly in South America. As a result, he frequently deviates from the images generated by these histories to displace and transform them. On the other hand, the artist does not seek to tell other stories, reveal hidden truths, or create new historical narratives from a colonized perspective. Instead, it aims to rewrite the same stories, exposing contradictory dependencies and complex political dynamics.
On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet...
De sino à sina (From Bell to Fate) is a six-channel sound installation by Carla Zaccagnini exploring the relationship between modern Brazil and its colonial past...
The work Calendars is composed of 1001 images of deserted public areas in Singapore printed on pages of a calendar set from the year of 2020 until 2096...
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power, 2010) is a mousetrap elegantly crafted in Carrara marble...
In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag...
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture...
Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ...
Consuegra’s Colombia is a mirror made in the shape of the artist’s home country—a silhouette that has an important resonance for the artist...