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.
Read MoreLagomarsino’s œuvre finds itself within a critical, decolonial project. However, in doing so, he does not primarily seek to tell other stories, or to reveal hidden truths or construct new historical narratives from the perspective of the colonised. Rather, his work aims to recount the same stories in different ways and uncover 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 examines.
Runo Lagomarsino (1977, Lund) lives and works between Malmö and São Paulo.
His works have been included in several institutional exhibitions such as A Universal History of Infamy, LACMA, Los Angeles (2017); The Restless Earth, Fondazione Trussardi, Milano (2017); Little lower layer, Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago (2017); Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2015); Under the same sun, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014).
Participated in Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017); 56th Biennale di Venezia, (2015); Gothenburg International Biennial (2015); 12th Biennial of Cuenca (2014); 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012); 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), among others.
His solo exhibitions include We have been called many names, Nils Stærk, Copenhagen (2017); West is everywhere you look, Francesca Minini, Milan (2016); They Watched Us for a Very Long Time, La Criée Center for Contemporary Art, Rennes (2015); Against My Ruins, Nils Stærk, Copenhagen (2014); We have everything, but that's all we have, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, (2013); This Thing Called The State, Oslo Kunstförening, Oslo (2013); Even Heroes Grow Old, Index, The Swedish Contemporary ArtFoundation, Stockholm (2012).
Text courtesy Mendes Wood DM.
