How do you describe your own art practice?
In the work AmericaAmnsia the phrase America Amnesia has been stamped repetitively line after line covering an entire room, creating something between a pattern and a sign. By the simple act of superimposing the last A in America with the first A in Amnesia and the last A in Amnesia with the first in America the work makes these two words inseparable.
I think that this work gives a good description of my artistic practice, works that are concerned with memory, displacement and the colonial heritage of contemporary Latin America.
Fractures, images and displays that tries to think about the forgotten history of America, the blind spots of historiography or what Walter Mignolo calls ‘the darker side of modernity’.
I see my work as a way of thinking through the visual where meanings coincide but at the same time don’t create a synthesis. Where the critical angle is in-between the different layers and narrations of the works. In different ways explore the conditions through which we create the world (and the word).
Ink applied on wall, two rubber stamps and black ink
Courtesy the artist, Mendes Wood Dm, São Paulo and Nils Staerk, Copenhagen
What was your first experience with art?
No idea, but a an exhibition of Antoni Tàpies at Lunds Konsthall in 1993 was very influential. There was something between abstraction, materiality and history that still occupies my thoughts.
28 plaster casts of the insides of hats and caps collected by the artist in L.A. from manual labourers placed on wooden plinths.
Photo credit: Malle Madsen
Courtesy the artist, Nils Staerk, Copenhagen
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
I don’t have one great source of inspiration, but the way I work is paradoxically clear and unclear at the same time.
40 gelatin silver prints and extraction of silver from the used photographic fixer
Prints 26.7 x 40 cm (each); silver 1 x 1 x 1cm
Photo credit: Renato Ghiazza
Courtesy the artist, Mendes Wood Dm, São Paulo, Nils Staerk, Copenhagen, and Francesca Minini, Milano
What do you need in order to create your work?
People and materials that makes some kind of resistance.
Site specific installation at Spanish Colonial Art Gallery, Lacma
Gold leaf
Photo credit: Installation photograph, A Universal History of Infamy, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
What are you working on at the moment?
I am preparing for a show in Lisbon, so much of my time is on the making of that exhibition. At the same time I am developing a long term performance project that will be on a train line in Copenhagen based on one sentence from John Berger: Every day people follow signs pointing to some place which is not their home.
Video HD, 5 min.
Photocredit : Simon Close.
Courtesy the artist, Mendes Wood Dm, São Paulo, Nils Staerk, Copenhagen, and Francesca Minini, Milano
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
The work of the Mexican artist Manuel Felguerez and his aesthetic machines. A surprise, as it was an artist I was not familiar with and it was a great experience seeing it for the first time.
Dia Projection loop, 80 perforated images in a slide projection carousel with timer. 1 original image (Mediterranean Sea), variable projection size
Photocredit: Agostino Osio
Golden sheets applied onto wall, cabinet with light bulbs and neon tubes stolen from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin
Wall: 360 x 460 cm, cabinet: 105 x 60 x 110 cm
Photocredit: Gustavo Lowry
Colección Ignacio Liprandi, Buenos Aires
