I was born with my parents’ exile, but my own repeated movement between Sweden and Brazil made me even more sensitive to the distances and proximities between what is understood as South and North. It forced me to rearticulate many aspects of my thinking and provoked an important shift in my work, which can most clearly be seen in relation to questions of representation, geography, memory, and diaspora. The difference is not in the subject matter; these are all topics with which I have been very engaged for a long time, but the change – of my place(s) – also transformed the ways in which I address these issues, the processes through which my works are produced, their materiality. They not only “ speak ” about geography, our connections to the colonial past, and displacement, but also embody these elements, accentuating a material experience that can carry the complex journey and movement of geopolitics.
– Runo Lagomarsino
The work of Runo Lagomarsino presents alternative perspectives on historical, political, and cultural power relationships. Often employing strategies of displacement and transformation to question the writing of history, especially within the context of South America, his installations, sculptures, pictures, and films focus on how today’s political and social environment has developed through historical processes and how this creates metaphors and pictures from which we read history and society.
Lagomarsino’s oeuvre finds itself within a critical, decolonial project. However, in doing so, he does not primarily seek to tell other stories, reveal hidden truths, or construct new historical narratives from the perspective of the colonized. Rather, his work aims to recount the same stories in different ways , uncovering conflicting dependencies and complex political events without reducing their inevitable ambiguity.
To search for fractures, for blind paths from where to tell other stories, from where to unlearn, and, particularly, from where to read the past and name the future. Born in Sweden to exiled Argentinian parents who descended from Italian émigrés who fled Europe during the First World War, Lagomarsino’s biography charts the very colonial histories that his works examine.
