Runo Lagomarsino

Biography

Runo Lagomarsino, born 1977, lives and works in Malmö

Education

Whitney Independent Study Program, New York 2007-2008

Malmö Art Academy 2001-2003. MA

Academy of Fine Art Valand, Gothenburg 1999-2001. BA

Solo exhibitions

2010 Horizon (Southern Sun Drawing) Elastic, Zona Maco, Mexico City

2010 Las Casas is Not a Home Elastic, Malmö

2009 Las Casas is Not a Home Mummery + Schnelle, London

2007 Those who control the past command the future - those who command the future conquer the past Overgaden, Copenhagen. Curated by Tone O Hansen

2006 This is no time for saluting flags Elastic, Malmö

2006 Out of Sight Gallery Verkligheten, Umeå (with Johan Tirén)

2006 Extended Arguments Gallery Box Gothenburg

2005 Extended Arguments Gallery Muu, Helsinki

2005 Där uppgifter saknas beror det på att situationen är oklar Elastic, Malmö

2003 I suppose that sometimes you have to burn the sky Krognoshuset Aura, Lund

2003 Gallery Mors Mössa, Gothenburg

2003 In my dreams europe is always less than a metre Gallery Peep, Malmö

2001 Schengenland. (Histories that nothing are) Båstadsgatan 4, Malmö (with Stewen Cutzner)

Selected Group Exhibitions

2010 Tristes Tropiques The Barber Shop, Lisbon. Curated by Pablo León De La Barra

2009 Free as Air and Water Cooper Union, New York. Curated by Saskia Bos and Steven Lam

2009 Photography Now: 2009 CFF - Centrum för Fotografi, Stockholm. Curated by Liv Stoltz and Aura Seikkula

2009 Mamõyguara opá mamõ pupé - Panorama da Arte Brasileira Museu De Arte Moderna-MAM, São Paulo. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa

2009 Delocalisation Exit Project Space, Skopje. Curated by Fatos Ustek

2009 Miguel Amado Presents ISCP, New York

2009 Report on Probability Kunsthalle Basel. Curated by Adam Szymczyk.

2009 If you don't know what the South is it's simply because you are from the North NO SOUL FOR SALE - A Festival of Independents, X Initiative, New York. Curated by Filipa Oliveira and Miguel Amado.

2009 This is the Score Part II Elastic, Malmö.

2009 Galleri Nova. Zagreb. Curated by WHW.

2009 Risk. Luleå Art Biennal, Luleå. Curated by Jan-Erik Lundström (catalogue).

2009 Read Thread. Tanas, Berlin. Curated by WHW (catalogue).

2009 A Space on the Side of the Road. Röda Sten, Gothenburg. Curated by Henrik Andersson and Kajsa Dahlberg.

2009 2da Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe San Juan. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Julieta González and Jens Hoffmann

2009 THIS IS NOT AMERICA El Descanso del Guerrero, San Juan. Curated by Pablo León de La Barra

2009 Changing Light Bulbs In Thin Air Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York. Curated by Summer Guthery

2009 Notes from The Living Dead Museum Living Art Museum, Reykjavik

2009 Posted 4: Private Talk - Public Space Cork (with Johan Tirén)

2008 Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding New School, Parsons, New York. Curated by Carin Kuoni

2008 Salon Of The Revolution HDLU- The House Of Artists, Zagreb. Curated by Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca (catalogue)

2008 Try again, fail again,fail better Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest. Curated by Hajnalka Somogyi

2008 European Social Forum Malmö

2008 no no no no no no no no no no no no there's no limit Signal, Malmö

2008 Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions The 7Th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, Hyunjin Kim and Ranjit Hoskote (catalogue)

2008 Farewell to Post-Colonialism The Third Guangzhou Triennial Guangdong. Curators: Gao Shiming, Sarat Maharaj, Chang Tsong-zung

2008 TINA B The Prague Contemporary Art Festival / Billboard Text Art, Prague

2008 AutoStop Malmö Konsthall, Malmö. Curated by Jacob Fabricius (catalogue)

2008 The Audacity of Desperation PS 122, New York

2008 Art Reclaims Foreign Affairs Ljubiljana. Curated by < rotor > (catalogue)

2008 Whitney Independent Study Program Exhibition, New York

2008 The unfair fair 1:1projects, Rome. Curated by Cecilia Canziani and Vincent Honoré (catalogue)

2008 Out of Place Cinemateket, Stockholm. Curated by Filmform

2007 Movement, Contingency, Community Gallery27, Kaywon School of Art & Design Seoul. Curated by Hyunjin Kim (catalogue)

2007 Hope is a good thing AtelierFrankfurt, Frankfurt. Curated by Borga Kanturk

2007 Ground Lost Galerija Nova, Zagreb. Curated by WHW

2007 Imagine Action Lisson Gallery, London. Curated by Emily Pethick

2007 Heterotopias Thessaloniki Biennalen, Thessaloniki, Curated Jan-Erik Lundström (catalogue)

2007 Art Liste Elastic, Basel

2007 I Want to be Able to See What It Is Lunds konsthall, Lund (catalogue)

2007 Ground Lost Forum StadtPark, Graz, Curated by WHW (catalogue)

2006 Contemporary Artfair, Istanbul

2006 Posters for re-making the world Ynkb, Copenhagen

2006 NADA Art Fair Elastic, Miami

2006 Post- Skor, Amsterdam, Curated by Krist Gruythuysen

2006 We all laughed at Christopher Columbus Platform Garanti, Istanbul, Curated by Krist Gruythuysen and November Paynter

2006 Time Space and Disorientiation Borgovico 33, Como, Curated by Marianna Garin (catalogue)

2006 We all laughed at Christopher Columbus Stedjlik Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, Curated by Krist Gruythuysen and November Paynter

2006 Should I stay or should I go? On Secondary Cities Rum 46, Århus, Curated by Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen, Jee-Eun Kim og Christian Schult

2005 Copenhagen Art Fair Elastic, Copenhagen

2005 Malmö Art academy 10; th anniversary Rooseum, Malmö (catalogue)

2005 Open Studio El Basilisco, Buenos Aires

2005 Sth Art Fair Elastic, Stockholm

2005 Publication (pages) Roll on, Lunds Konsthall

2004 Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Denmark, Aarhus, (with Johan Tiren), (catalogue), Curated by Trine Rytter Andersen, Kirsten Dufour, Tone O. Nielsen & Anja Raithel (catalogue)

2004 Galleri Arnstedt och Kullgren, Båstad

2004 Permanent Revolution / Open Studios Iaspis, Stockholm

2003 Look Into The Future - And Understand Why Iaspisgalleriet, Stockholm, Curated by Jan Christensen

2003 After the future 10 th Biennal of Moving Images, Centre for Contemporary Images, Saint-Gervais Genève, curated By Lesley Young and Charles Esche (catalogue)

2003 Go Liquidación Total, Madrid, Curated by Elena Tzotzi

2003 Hot Spot, Malmö Museum (with Johan Tiren)

2002 FFF- more people mediate collective project during the European summit in Copenhagen.

2002 Malmö-Oslo 1-0 oVERstation, Passanger, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo

2002 Working title:Memory Helsingfors, Trondheim och Copenhagen (catalogue)

2001 To Accept Folkets Hus, Malmö

2000 One Minute Video Amsterdam (catalogue)

2000 Buchmesse 2000 (with d20099), Leipzig (catalogue)

Awards and Grants

2010 Cifo - Grant Program Recipients, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami

2009 Längmanska Kulturfonden

2009 Capacete, residency, Rio De Janeiro

2008 Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse

2007 Iaspis support exhibition abroad (II)

2007 KulturKontak Nord

2006 Iaspis residency Platform Garanti, Istanbul

2006 Iaspis support exhibition abroad

2005 Asse & Richard Björklunds fond, Malmo Art Museum

2005 Lunds Konsthalls Vänner 2005

2005 El Basilsico, residency Buenos Aires

2005 Iaspis support exhibition abroad

2005 Sleipner travel grant

2004 Working grant, The Arts Grants Committee

2004 Nifca residency, Suomenlinna, Helsinki

2004 Sleipner travel grant

2004 Iaspis residency, Stockholm

2003 Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse

Publications

A Prior- Olivia Plender

Mousse June/July

SHIFTER 13 : Indira Sylvia Belissop Editors Avi Alpert and Sreshta Rit Premnath

Reality and Visions for Independent Curators Far Away So Close

"An Ambiguous Case" Casco Issues XI

Blind Spot Magazine, Issue 39

"We all laughed at Christopher Columbus" Revolver Archive fur aktuelle kunst

"The lost moment"

Fabrik nr 2.03

Re/aktion (med Johan Tiren)

Socialistisk Debatt nr 1.03

Terezin is like a diamond

For the vivinity of concord, Sophie Tottie

Bibliography

Report on Probability Kusnthalle Basel, Quinn Latimer, Frieze, October 2009

Red Thread TANAS, Berlin, Daniel Miller. Frieze, July 2009

"Svindlande resa längs väggen" Thomas Millroth, Sydsvenska Dagbladet

"Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding", Vera List Center, New York Critics Picks, Miguel Amado, www.artforum.com, 2009

"Runo Lagomarsino at Mummery + Schnelle" M.O. Berger http://sawdustreview.wordpress.com

"Movement, Contingency, Community" Emily Pethick, Untitled # 45, 2008

"Those who control the past command the future - those who command the future conquer the past" Fred Andersson, OEI, nr 33-35 2007

"Vass politisk kritik" Caroline Söderholm, Sydsvenska dagbladet

"We all laughed at Christopher Columbus" Tirdad Zolghadr, Frieze # 103, 2006.

"Begär och exotism" Paletten # 265

"Maskerad Våld" Ann-Charlotte Glasberg Blomqvist Göteborgsposten

"The Moderna exhibition" text by Annika Öhrner

IaspisGalleriet, Stockholm: "Look into the future - and understand why"

Anders Olofsson, Konsten.net

"Samtidskonsten som kräver en hel del" Lotta Bergström, Hallands Posten

"Lågmält och estetiskt om människor på flykt" Carolina Söderholm, Sydsvenska Dagbladet

"Konst som utforksar gränser" Linda Fagerström, Helsingborgs Dagblad

Fabrik nr 2.03

"Bildberättandets återkomst" Pontus Kyander, Sydsvenska Dagbladet

Collections

Teixeira de Freitas' Art Collection, Portugal

Guangdong Museum of Art, Guandong

Paulo Vieira Collection, Rio De Janeiro

Malmö Art Museum, Malmö

Lund City Art Collection, Lund

Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening

Private Collections

Other

Member of the Production Unit, 2005-
The Production Unit is a network for artists working with documentary storytelling, media criticism and narrative experiments. The project focuses on a critical analysis of history writing, and how narratives and investigative journalism are used for political motives. It includes: Petra Bauer, Nanna Debois Buhl, Kajsa Dahlberg, Sara Jordenö, Conny Karlsson, Runo Lagomarsino, Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen)
www.productionunit.org

Member of the board at gallery Signal, Malmö, 2001-2005
www.signal.org

A conversation between Miriam Bäckström, Maria Hedlund, Runo Lagomarsino and Marianna Garin.

Realised in Stockholm on the 16th June 2006. For the exhibition "Time Space and Disorientiation" Borgovico 33, Como.

Runo: The wall drawing Position of Geography, (2003), shows a map of the world that has been reduced and abstracted into a geometrical system. The construction describing what the world looks like and who is responsible for its definition become central issues. And there is the matter of where the middle of the world is placed... the centre of the world.

Miriam: Where is that centre?

Runo: In the points of intersection, in that the lines are not neutral in themselves but are filled with history. For me the viewer's ambivalence is important. The fact that one first sees the drawing as an abstract image and that the construction of the map creeps up on one.

Marianna: When one looks at your works they seem very minimalist, very reduced and rather poetic. Content-wise they seem particularly concrete and rooted in reality and this creates an interesting tension. Can you tell us about how you work and how you use the different abstract elements in your new work Anticipated Discoveries?

Runo: The new work that I am going to show in Como, Anticipated Discoveries, consists of several pictures, maps and collages that are presented in a glass showcase that creates a reference to the world of museums. The starting point for the work is a map of Europe on which a refugee smuggler who works from Sweden has indicated how his operations function on a practical level. I was interested in making people aware of the situation and of opposing the very negative views that surround his work. He describes himself as being part of a modern, unarmed guerrilla movement. What I do in Anticipated Discoveries is to root this in other narratives and in an historical context. His lines refer to the other map, to the lines on the wall drawing. He tries to deconstruct that picture.

Miriam: Though he does not actually do that, in that the geographical map remains there.

Runo: He has to go round the map. He redraws it. He places his map on top of the other one.

Miriam: The map is still geographical, what he does is to deconstruct other systems or exploit other systems. It is usual to combine two worlds because the map is so physical. I was given a book with a world map of feelings that looks completely different, and that is fun to trace. They work together, they communicate with each other. Although they are two different maps, they are united.

Runo: I bring together the map of Europe with other images. I did not want the map to acquire such a powerful 'aura', but rather that one should be able to read it through different historical and political layers, and reinforce this through the combination of actual and fictitious pictures, for example the picture of a fata morgana. In the work I have included a quotation pronounced last year by a director of Christie's in occasion of the sale of the earliest map that bears the word America on it. He spoke of the "venerable geographer", referring to Martin Waldseemuller who drew the map. But this is interesting in relation to the refugee smuggler, for what he is doing is also geography and for me he is a modern geographer.

Miriam: One thing that struck me was that in photography, for example, there are different types of vision. We can only focus on one point and everything else becomes more or less blurred.

Maria: Yes, blurred, but then we make use of other senses that help us.

Runo: The third work is a sculpture where a slide is projected onto a sheet of MDF-board. The work is a model with the character of an advertising billboard. The words on the projection are We all laughed at Christopher Columbus, taken from the song They all laughed at Christopher Columbus that Chet Baker, amongst others, sings. I changed they to we so that the laughing is incorporated into a collective of which I am part. At the same time it is really about something else, a tragic and critical laughter that is about how one interprets the passage of history and how the colonial past is constantly writing the history of today. I have shown the two earlier works (Position of Geography and We all laughed at Christopher Columbus) separately in various contexts, but I work in a way that makes me return to past works that together create a narrative.

Marianna: I would like to talk a bit about how you relate to the aspect of absence in your respective works. There is a sense of abandonment or isolation in Maria's pictures. With Runo one has a feeling of absence of violence in the video Notion of conflict, dance of the piñata, (2004), in which someone wearing a blindfold tries to hit a doll wearing military uniform with a stick. In Histories that nothing are, (2001-2003), there is a man who runs eternally carrying a Molotov cocktail that he never throws. Opposition is represented by the absence of an action and the symbolic language is strengthened. With Miriam it is the absence of people in the photographic series such as Estate of a Deceased Person, (1992-1996), Set Constructions, (1995-2000), or Apartments, (2000-2001). And this inevitably leads me on to the question as to how you work in relation to absence-presence. I have in mind, for example, Maria's images in which people are often merely intimated.

Maria: Indeed, that creates a stronger sense of presence. When something is intimated one has to supply it oneself and this makes the viewer more involved in the work. But for me it is largely a matter of the work being present and not whether there is a person in the picture or not. Rather, it is something else that is important.

Miriam: It is not exactly a way of relating, but rather a possibility for distance. It is difficult to study something or to let someone else study it, if there is another person there wanting attention. But what is presence, is it the other person?

Marianna: As the beholder, you can project a sort of presence into what you are looking at, by means of experiences or identifications that you put into the picture.

Miriam: But for me it is simpler to start such a process when I look at a work if I do not need to conduct a conversation, but I am able to take whatever time I need with the material. I think that one can develop presence-absence into completely different things. I believe it is a matter of questions and answers.

Runo: I think that in relation to the viewer one needs to trust one's own audience. They can add their own ideas - what you call presence - in the context. I think that the audience can fill in things and, with their own time, can take in a work and understand its inherent layers. But in the works that you mention, absence is also a matter of resistance. That absence can be something that is active as in Extended Arguments, (2005), with the boycotted football match.

Maria: I am a bit curious when you mention isolation or abandonment. What do you actually mean? It sounded so sorrowful.

Marianna: This is not the case in all of your works, but I am thinking for example of Deserted ,(2004), with the photographs of dried up houseplants, or in the traces of dirt in At my Home,(1997). In Deserted the plants had been forgotten for a time.

Maria: Yes, that may be true. But since I photographed the plants and made these portraits one could also claim that I took care of them.

Marianna: I agree with you that in your caring actions there is a feeling of both absence and presence. The various everyday elements that one recognizes so well appear as if distorted or displaced.

Maria: The focus on whiteness in the At my Home pictures is equally great. It is a matter of both/and, in which the one gives to the other. It is just like the case of absence and presence that reinforce each other.

Miriam: I thought about other pairs of opposites that are interesting with regard to presence-absence, for example text-image, description-narrative. If one thinks of your glass showcase, Runo, it is a description but it is not a narrative. And the description is more distant, is it not? The narrative, I think, is more presence, more subjective, which gives us another pair of opposites in objective-subjective.

Runo: Though I do not know whether a description is more objective?

Miriam: But this is just a matter of agreements.

Maria: Yes, but surely there are different levels.

Miriam: That is what we all do in our work. We question that arrangement, because just as you have said, it contains both.

Runo: I think that in some way, Anticipated Discoveries is just a description, even if it is in some sense a fiction. I use it as a statement but mix it with something else that simultaneously makes it a narrative.

Miriam: You make use of an objective language even though it is totally subjective, and this creates a tension in the work.

Maria: This is how one creates a power structure and how one makes a map. One maintains that these are fixed norms even though they are actually constructions.

Marianna: It looks like an abstraction though the map is, in a sense, a construction of something extremely concrete, something that represents a political or historical reality. In Position of Geography, for example, the map does not remain a pure abstraction in that it represents a reality, for example through the consequences that people have to live with when new boundaries are drawn up by colonial powers. Or else the drawn line refers to a political geography in which reality can be pulled towards a total abstraction, a removal from reality itself. In this regard how is your relationship to abstraction?

Runo: For me abstraction is a way of communicating these complex issues. By combining abstract elements with political questions the work is charged, exploiting both the subversive and the seductive.

Miriam: Abstraction is, I think, a way of avoiding logical thinking, which is not always as logical as we imagine since it is also a construction. Abstraction can, not always but often, be a useful tool for deconstructing and reconstructing things and thereby achieving something different.

Maria: Like some sort of collage.

Miriam: One does not know where one will end up oneself, but this is a tool we use.

Runo: In earlier works I frequently used graph paper and the ruler. The problem that interested me was about concepts as neutrality, correctness and the norm. The gap between a "universal" instrument that would create "equality" has historically (from colonialism to the Schengen Treaty) always been defined and categorized.

Miriam: Neutrality, correctness and the norm exist as agreements. Abstraction is something else.

Runo: The map is in a sense an abstraction while at the same time it is based on some form of norm; in that sense they are very similar.

Miriam: But abstraction is a very broad concept. If we are going to discuss it we need to establish what it is, to define it more precisely. What, then, is the opposite of abstraction? You have claimed that it is what is concrete but if one applies that to language it can turn into a cliché. The cliché is our least common denominator, the simplest language that we can communicate with, do you not agree? The cliché is very banal. We are all aware of it as a simple linguistic construction, a widely based agreement.

Maria: But is it so widespread? Clichés can exist among groups of people who have an awareness of them.

Miriam: All the pairs of opposites can just as well exchange places depending on the situation, as with the map being both concrete and abstract.

Marianna: Now that we are discussing language can you tell us a bit about how you worked with the film Rebecka? You have mentioned the interview having a form like photography in that it documents a conversation. Can you enlarge on that? What is it that interests you in the interview as a form?

Miriam: It is the same reason that you are holding this conversation. We have an idea or an agreement about a recorded situation in which there are also possibilities of improvisation. Though I wonder whether they really exist. There is an agreement about authenticity, this is happening here and now. But we also know that, when we read the text that you have edited on the basis of this conversation, you will have a particular interest that you want to highlight. And you have the power to do this since someone has to make the decisions about the material, and here there is a similarity with photography. Even if we all recognize and identify what is there, there has to be someone who has a reason for recording the situation. There are several points that are common also to photography but that, at the same time, are something totally different. Interviews can exist in any sort of paper or magazine and this is true also of photography. So it is a relatively open medium to work with and one is not obliged immediately to establish a valuation as to what it is, as with an essay or a novel. If one presents a novel there are expectations about the text. People have a picture of what to expect whereas with an interview the expectations are not as great but people are prepared for just about anything happening in the text. If the interview is interesting one can get very close to the people involved.

Marianna: Another work that appears both in book form and as a sound piece is Anonymous Interviews, (2004), in which interviews with unknown people are read by an actor.

Miriam: I worked with not identifying the people that appear in the text, and not separating them and not giving them names or presenting them, and not even knowing who says what, but letting the text flow. It is reminiscent of a book that Carsten Höller and I produced for the Venice Biennial All images of an Anonymous Person, (2005). Here the chronological order does not exist and one receives very little information as to who has taken the picture of the person. As we were discussing earlier, those who have looked through the book with all the pictures of her taken by different people have come to me and told me who they think she is and they all have very different stories. So in the last analysis this has little to do with her and more to do with the people that look at the pictures of her. Everybody makes their own history. Everyone uses pictures to narrate something about themselves.

Marianna: How did you work on the script for Rebecka?

Miriam: I interviewed Rebecka regularly for six months at the same time that I was interviewing other people for the book Anonymous Interviews for the same exhibition. When I was preparing the manuscript I mixed the conversations with Rebecka, using bits from the 13 interviews that I had recorded. I also asked Rebecka to read the book before we started filming. So in some of the sequences she has chosen to answer from the book. In the finished material I have created people or situations that I think are interesting both in writing in the book and as sound recordings. And so there is material to work with in preparing the script. When, in the film, I say that she should recount a memory she narrates an episode from the book and not from her own memory. When she sits and remembers, she tries to remember things from the text and not from herself.

Marianna: That is exactly what I was wondering about. The fact that although she is narrating a memory that we believe is personal, we know nothing more about how this memory actually affected her life. There is no escape; the viewer is subordinated to her time dimension and to her drama. The only way out would be to learn more about her. When we have seen it all it is as though time has moved on but we still know nothing about her, she remains anonymous. Was the script the result of a collaboration?

Miriam: I wrote the script myself but she could read it before we started filming, so she was a bit prepared but not very familiar with it.

Runo: At certain points in the film one can see that she is reading from the manuscript.

Marianna: Yes, that is what is confusing and it could equally well be part of the construction. In the end we do not know who she is or on what level she moves, though at times it feels as if we are in a private conversation.

Miriam: This has to do with the character of the questions but that is what I also mean by power. The questions make the conversation. At times it can seem that one poses a question and the other person answers in a way that has nothing to do with the question. But the question is still there. Depending on how interesting or how dull or private the questions are, a foundation is laid for the conversation; that is where one directs the conversation. In the script I was trying to get too close to her. For what reason now I do not know. But whom do I get too close to? Is it her as a person or her playing a role? She is there in the form of an actress so that what I get too close to is a construction.

Marianna: If one considers the aspect of authenticity of photography in that it represents a reality, or speaks of what it portrays, in what way do you make use of photography?

Maria: In that it represents an image of something, it is a step towards...

Marianna: If one thinks about the aspect of time what does it mean to work with film as a medium of artistic expression?

Maria: My photographic works contain accumulated time - a movement into the picture. On one level they seem very static but on another level they are not. For me it would have been exciting to change the time axis and to begin thinking in a different way in relationship to time. A way of opening up; a different way of thinking about photography.

Marianna: You are going to show a film and a photographic work that refers to the film.

Maria: Yes. It is a matter of altering how we experience space and time. As though space becomes time. It is a sequence of images that is shown in the room. They could be stills from a film though actually they are photographs. The viewer has to move about the room in order to form an impression.

Miriam: To return to your question. I have never really been that interested in photography but rather in how one can use a photograph and what our habits are with regard to photography. I experience photography as a way of thinking like you, Maria, were discussing. We live in a photographic era and we see and think in terms of photographs. We all have this technology in our thinking since we currently have a common pattern of thinking. So it is very interesting to look at other cultures that do not work with photography but that have other patterns of thought that are central to them and that perhaps relate to a much more abstract understanding of time and place; that have a different approach.

Marianna: How do you work with vision in your most recent work?

Maria: The work consists of a sequence of black & white photographs from an aquarium. They show a tank in which one can see a whale swimming around. One can also see reflections of the people watching the whale and the curved tank can be seen as a sort of eye. In terms of vision there are several levels and displacements. The photographs will have glass in front of them.

Marianna: In the pictures the room seems undefined.

Maria: The mirror images of the people and the whale swap places. Sometimes one can see the whale close to the glass and it becomes a dominant image, almost jumping out of the picture while the people seem to move into the picture. The spatial situation changes. They change positions and the situation becomes undefined.

Marianna: What is the film's recitation about and what is it that interests you in that particular narrative?

Maria: There is a narrator who reads a chapter of Melville's Moby Dick. The chapter is entitled The Whiteness of the Whale. It is a remarkable piece of writing concerned with persuading us that whiteness really represents something evil and not something good as we normally assume. Ishmael, the only survivor of the shipwreck, tells the story though at times the story is taken over by Melville himself. The entire narration is rather obscure. In this chapter one does not know who is telling the story. Whiteness starts to become a matter of evil and the narrative is about changing concepts.

Miriam: What is the language of the voice-over?

Maria: American English which is the language of the book. The Italian version is available on paper at the exhibition. The text is difficult and not readily comprehensible but it is very beautiful.

Marianna: I recently read José Saramago's book Blindness in which he reflects on an imagined epidemic of blindness that spreads around the world. In the Moby Dick chapter there is talk of snow and blindness and how whiteness can cause a person to lose their capacity to see which also happens in Saramago's tale in which blindness is white and dazzling. Blindness has also a symbolic level and this blindness is manifest, in the view of Saramago, in a perverse manner when we humiliate living things, when human dignity is insulted daily by the powerful figures of the world.

Maria: Exactly. At the end of the chapter he talks about snow as the optimal image of evil which can make the beholder blind. The reason that I chose this text from Moby Dick was that I wanted to include a mythological level. The first time that I visited the aquarium the water in the tank was opaquely white and one could not see the whale. And so I had this picture in my head of there being a giant whale in the tank which I could not see but which I had to photograph. Next time I was there, some months later, the water was very different in quality and one could see the whales and they were not very big.

Miriam: Were you disappointed?

Maria: No I was not disappointed for something else happened. It is precisely that one sees something and then one creates a picture of it or a narrative about it and this generates certain expectations which are not fulfilled. Something else happens, something ongoing. I did not know how it would end.

Miriam: But perhaps that was because you allowed yourself not to know.

Marianna: Was the film done in just one occasion?

Maria: The photographs are from my second visit and the film was made during my third visit half a year later and after I had thought a lot about the photographs. On my fourth visit the whales had gone. They were females and they had been taken to an aquarium in Georgia to be inseminated by Russian he-whales. At my fifth visit, only a month ago, I had expected the whales to return with young but there was a sign saying that the whales were not coming back and that the tank was going to be used for seals.

Marianna: Earlier we spoke about the pair of opposites represented by text and picture. You often speak of the gap between subject and image

Maria: I have worked on defining size and colour nuances. In the At my Home pictures there is a fixed, formal structure and they have quite large white and clean surfaces so that initially one may not notice the dirt; this grows on one gradually.

Marianna: The size of your pictures is interesting in that one get very close to the objects that you photograph. I am thinking about Descending from Above, (2003), a photograph of some wooden stairs taken from above where the lack of shadows causes the spatial dimension to disappear, and one thinks that one is looking at a floor. But I am also thinking of the extreme close-ups of the checked shirts, which becomes almost three-dimensional.

Maria: With the enlarged details, to return to the At my Home series, it is as though something small grows large, takes up too much space in one's head and becomes irritant. When one has seen a detail in one's everyday existence and becomes really aware of it, it can assume such proportions.

Runo: Yes, the shirt pictures are extremely physical. I saw them at an exhibition in Malmö, as a viewer one could really dress in them. While in another series you took very distanced pictures from the Savannah.

Maria: The small-check shirts are very much about how an everyday object changes when one photographs it. One can see that the photograph shows the back of a shirt but then the pattern takes over and one cannot any longer actually give a name to what one is seeing. It is a matter of breaking up the language.

Miriam: What happens when one does not see anything? Now I ask myself just as much.

Maria: It is transformed and becomes something else.

Miriam: Something that we can all understand.

Marianna: So, by means of the light, for example, you can create these transformations?

Maria: Yes, they can appear in any photographic image. In the most recent of my works they have been very pared down and represent the essence of something - of a photographic image. To me the photograph is so deceitful and manipulative, and on one level I am concerned with that while on another level I am concerned with something else too. If I am to explain how I relate to photography I can state that I find it a very awkward and difficult medium and working with photography is, quite simply, very challenging.

Miriam: At the same time that we know that photographs are extremely subjective they are presented with an aura of objectivity because there are aspects that we all recognize. But photography can easily turn itself inside out if one is not conscious of certain things.

Maria: It is a matter of paying close attention.

Runo: Photographic images have a tendency to be seductive.

Miriam: Something I found interesting was the concept of speculations that Andres Kreuger - whom I am working with at the moment - is very interested in. And I have realized that it is there that my interest in improvisations is to be found. One needs a particular characteristic to speculate because it represents a different way of thinking; that one can test things together or by oneself as one also does in improvisation. To do this one needs to free what one says from what one think. I need to be able to say things that I do not necessarily believe just to be able to speculate, to place myself in different positions. When one conducts interviews by e-mail one is asked a question and then I start to speculate and then I am asked the counter question: do I really believe what I am saying? For then this person is only interested in knowing about my values! But with the way we work one is not interested in the answers and one perhaps does not make a statement either.

Essay & guide - Runo Lagomarsino and Johan Tirén

Those who control the past command the future - those who command the future conquer the past
September 1 - october 21, 2007

Reality Under the Influence: A Guide to the Exhibition

By Tone Olaf Nielsen, Independent Curator

INTENTION & MOTIVATION

Those Who Control the Past Command the Future - Those Who Command the Future Conquer the Past is an exhibition about ideology, or to be more correct, ideology's effect on our perception of reality. Taking its title from a passage in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which draws a picture of a future totalitarian society that controls its citizens by means of surveillance, thought control, and rewriting history in order to make the past comply with its view of the world,1 the show examines how ideology structures the way we perceive of ourselves and the surrounding world. In short, how ideology constructs what we know to be reality.To produce an exhibition that examines the notion of ideology at this point in time might strike some as odd. After all, the "collapse of socialism and communism" with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the surrender of more and more socialist and democratic governments to capitalist economics have repeatedly been said to mark "the end of ideology." Capitalism's triumphal progress, initially in the US and Western Europe, and since 1990 around most of the globe, is the result of a natural force "like the weather [...] that comes and goes without any human agency to control it,"2 the argument goes, not the effect of global consent to a particular ideological model. In other words, capitalism is beyond ideology.One could argue, however, that what we have in fact witnessed since the fall of the Berlin wall is a hegemonic shift of ideology from a collectivistic socialist/social democratic conception of society to an individualistic liberal/neoliberal conception of society. The surrender to pro-global market politics, in some countries attended by a gradual dismantling of the welfare state, has been accompanied by fierce culture wars and struggles for the right to determine society's normative values, which testifies to a strong ideology-based politics. Thus, one could claim, as has Gregory Elliot, that our time is a "quintessentially ideological age."3

IDEOLOGY

With this in mind, it might be useful to encircle what the term ideology signifies and how we refer to it in this exhibition. Historically, the concept of ideology has undergone many definitions and remains highly contested.4 Generally regarded as a concept that seeks to explain the relation of ideas to their social context, the term "ideology" was first coined in 1797 by Destutt de Tracy to denote the science of ideas. Fifty years later, Marx and Engels would link the concept to the material base and define ideology as a distorted, false consciousness, which derived from and served to mask the social contradictions in a class society. Thereby legitimating a structure of domination, it could only provide symbolic resolutions to social problems and had to be vanquished by a revolutionary transformation of the social conditions, which had engendered it. Later Marxists theorists removed themselves somewhat from this notion of "false consciousness" and redefined ideology as a system of ideas. Vladimir Lenin, for instance, defined ideology as the political beliefs of a social or economic class (i.e. bourgeois ideology or socialist ideology) and saw socialist ideology as a positive force in the development of a revolutionary consciousness towards a socialist state. Georg Lukács went on to claim that ideologies are not false per se, but false because they impose structural limitations on the classes, whose thoughts they represent. Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser would distance themselves even further from the traditional Marxist opposition between ideology and truth/true consciousness and contribute with definitions, which have informed much post-Marxist, structuralist, and poststructuralist theory thereafter. Gramsci introduced the concept of ideological hegemony, which he defined as the dominance and control of one class' ideology throughout society. Seeking to explain how the capitalist class had obtained hegemony, he abandoned traditional Marxist theories of power and claimed that hegemonic control was gained and maintained not solely through the deployment or threat of force in political life, but by manufacturing consent across class divisions in civil society. To Gramsci, no regime could sustain itself primarily through state power and armed force, but had to have broad popular support and legitimacy as well. This manufacture of consent, he argued, took place throughout the social order in institutions, relationships, popular culture, etc., so that an ideological bond between ruler and ruled was created. The subordinate classes would internalize the ideas, forms, morals, and interests of the dominant class and come to see them as "common sense" and the "natural order of things." To Gramsci, the only way to end the hegemony of the ruling capitalist class was to break this ideological bond by establishing a "counter hegemony," which focused equally on structural and ideological change. Only then could the subordinate classes acquire a consciousness that would allow them to question the ruling class' right to rule.

Combining Gramsci's theories with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusser theorized ideology as the realm of the "imaginary" and defined it as an eternal system of representation that expresses the lived relation between human beings and their conditions of existence. To Althusser, specific ideologies come and go historically, but the realm of ideology has no history: it is the universal means by which subjects are constituted and individuated as social identities. Gramsci and Althusser would open the door for subsequent definitions of ideology as discourse in structuralist and poststructuralist theory and ideology as a system of signification or representation in post-Marxist and Cultural Studies theory. Common to them all was a rejection of the traditional Marxist opposition between ideology as false consciousness versus the truth/true consciousness on the grounds that "the truth/true consciousness" are themselves discursive. Michel Pêcheux, for instance, examined ideology as the inscriptions of social power in language. Figures associated with the literary journal Tel Quel generated a notion of ideology as the arbitrary, but motivated "closure" of the infinite productivity of language. Michel Foucault would abandon the notion of ideology all together and replace it with his power-knowledge theory, in which he argues that power is created and transferred through an "economy" of discourse where knowledge not only assumes the authority of "the truth" but has the power to make itself true. Knowledge is thus a discursive formation sustaining a regime of truth. Finally, Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe as well as Stuart Hall have in different ways rejected the close association of ideology with class in order to introduce notions of a plurality and conflict (Lauclau & Mouffe) and identity and difference (Hall) in relation to ideology. As Phillip Hammond writes, "What was needed, after the death of 'that single, singular subject we used to call Socialist Man', was a counter-hegemonic project capable of uniting a plurality of identities and interests, without obliterating 'real differences'."5 Laclau & Mouffe thus define ideology as a field of class-neutral elements, within which there is a struggle to articulate such elements to different hegemonic principles, whereas Hall characterizes it as a system of signification or representation that similarly to language endows phenomena and subjects with significance.

THE EXHIBITION

Informed by all the definitions above, Those Who Control the Past Command the Future - Those Who Command the Future Conquer the Past applies a broad notion of ideology as a process of meaning construction, which a) produces a re-presentation of the world and an interpretation of the existing social order, b) presents a model for what is a "good" society, and c) offers an account of the means through political and thereby social change is produced. Divided into three sections, the exhibition presents seven recent works by artists Runo Lagomarsino and Johan Tirén, who for the past decade, both together and individually, have been working with art that takes a focus on current power structures and the historical, ideological, political, and social constructions that sustain them.

In the first part of the exhibition, Tirén presents two projects, which in different ways address the ideological premises for Europe's recent move far to the right in the political spectrum. In the second part of the show, four works by Lagomarsino put this move into a discursive and historical perspective. The last part of the exhibition presents a collective work by the two artists, which reflects on the possibilities of establishing a future "counter hegemony."Common to all the works is their attempt to encircle the moment, when ideology deconstructs; when ideology in a Derridian sense reveals itself as a mere "supplement" for the fundamental absence of any reality or truth outside of it on which to justify its continued operation. Ideology is disclosed as a mere linguistic construct, devoid of any meaning outside of the system of relationships in which it exists.6 With this encirclement, Those Who Control the Past Command the Future - Those Who Command the Future Conquer the Past exposes tiny cracks in the system from where to act resistantly.

The first work to encounter the viewer is Tirén's large-scale video installation We're saying what you're thinking. Produced in 2005/2007, the work is a critical examination of the ideology, history, and strategies of Sverigedemokraterna (The Sweden Democrats), an ultranationalist and xenophobic political party that received wide support in Southern Sweden during the 2006 Swedish election. The work consists of three video interviews projected onto three large freestanding screens, in which the artist discusses the ideologies and growth of the Sweden Democrats with the party's former secretary, Jan Milld, the party's former press officer, Jonas Åkerlund, and the journalist Daniel Poohl, who for years has been devoted to the study of right-wing movements in Sweden.In the work, Tirén applies a deconstructive methodology. Rather than aggressively interrogating the Sweden Democrats in a manner similar to that used by the political opposition and mass media in general, the artist takes his point of departure in a close reading of the party's program, which he asks the party members to expand on. As such, the interviews become courteous conversations that provide the party members the rare opportunity to express their vision of the ideal society and its realization in full. However, as the interviews progress, inconsistencies and contradictions in the party's ideology are slowly teased out by Tirén's method of inquiry. Key concepts like "nation," "culture," "Swedishness," and "normality" emerge as nothing more than representations without an original source or verifiable external reality on which to justify them. The interview with Daniel Poohl serves to analyze these contradictions further and contextualize them ideologically and historically. We're saying what you're thinking becomes a testimony to the general political development in Europe, where extreme right-wing parties are gaining increasing influence at the parliamentary level and have succeeded in shifting the entire political spectrum far to the right. The work exposes Europe's inability to deal with difference as a result of migration and questions whether it is the response of Europe's established parties to these right-extremist currents that has paved the way for their increasing influence.

Tirén's video installation is surrounded by the poster series Notes in connection with the celebration of a National Day, which he produced earlier this year on the occasion of the Swedish National Day. The series takes its starting point in the politically acceptable and often socially supported nationalism, which manifests itself during celebrations of National Days or national sports events. In the series, Tirén points to the manufacturing of consent described by Gramsci andexamines how ideologically founded values and beliefs connected to the notion of "the nation" and "nationalism" are naturalized so they appear as truths. Juxtaposing idyllically charged imagery with text, the series closely mimics existing discourses and representations known from the social and political field. But by displacing them into the gallery space, Tirén discloses their constructed nature. The series leaves the viewer with a number of questions: What undercurrents do this socially accepted nationalism produce? How do they relate to the nationalism of the extreme right? And where, if at all, do they meet?

With those questions in mind, the viewer is led through a corridor with a title wall before entering the second section of the show, which presents four works by Lagomarsino.

Installed in the center of the space, the first work to meet the viewer is Untitled from 2003. Consisting of one hundred length units drawn by hand on four pieces of metric graph paper, the work is a scathing critique of the metric system as a European compulsory standard by which to measure, administrate, and control land, peoples, goods, and ideas. What appears to be an exact representation of a metric ruler, at closer inspection turns out to be an illustration of the impossibility of any unchanging and uniform measuring device. Neither the individual units nor their total length add up to any known basic unit in the metric system. Furthermore, the hand drawn units are so irregular that their exact length and width can never be determined precisely.With these "imperfections," Lagomarsino critically mocks the metric system's claim to permanence, perfection, and measurability and exposes it as an arbitrary, imaginary construction. The system by which the West continues to colonize land, draw borders, control peoples, and administrate goods turns out to be pure fiction, and no universal grounds for the continued ideological hegemony of the West can be claimed.

To the right of the drawing, Lagomarsino's second contribution is projected: the single-channel video installation Untitled (Extended Arguments) from 2005. Based on documentary footage from the 1973 World Cup qualifying football match between Chile and the Soviet Union, it repeats the goal scored by the Chilenian team during the match. What has caught Lagomarsino's attention in regards to this match is a number of things. Firstly, it took place right after the September 11 military coup, where the democratically elected Marxist President Salvador Allende was deposed, and General Pinochet installed a right-wing military dictatorship that would last for 16 years. Secondly, it took place in the infamous Estado Nacional, a football arena in Chile's capital Santiago, where thousands of political opponents were jailed, tortured, and executed by Pinochet's junta. Lastly, the Chilenian team played against itself, as the Soviet team boycotted the event in protest against Pinochet's regime. With no opponent, the Chilenian team "won" the match.Untitled (Extended Arguments) is a pertinent examination of the rejection and silencing of oppositional voices and the responsibility of fellow citizens towards such silencing. With his continuous looping of the goal, Lagomarsino illustrates the moment when all opposition has been silenced, and democratic deliberation is replaced by totalitarian monologue. Yet, the Chilenian football players play as if nothing has happened, as if their involvement has no consequence. On one level, the work brings to mind the decreasing possibilities for civil disobedience and the unconstitutional incarceration of political prisoners after our September 11 and the subsequent War on Terror. On another, it questions what will be the effects of the shifting of the entire political spectrum to the right. With both left- and right-wing parties claiming the center of the political spectrum in the West, are we too approaching a situation where we have managed to silence ethnic, religious, and political others to get the final word?

Lagomarsino's third contribution to the exhibition is the single-channel video Notion of Conflict, Dance of the Piñata from 2004. Installed behind the representation of the metric ruler, the work explores aspects of oppression and resistance through references to the piñata game. An old Latin American game, where succession of blindfolded, stick-wielding people try to break the papier-mâché piñata figure in order to collect the candy/toys inside of it, the piñata figure has a complex history. It was allegedly brought to Italy from China by Marco Polo and later introduced to Latin America by the European colonizers, where it was used as a pedagogical tool in the "Christianization" of the "natives." Today, the piñata has become part of popular culture and is used to celebrate special occasions such as birthdays and Christmas.In the video, the viewer sees a blindfolded male figure trying to hit a piñata figure shaped as a human body dressed in a military uniform. When he manages to hit, the strokes are brutally violent. After a couple of minutes, the video slowly fades to black, leaving the viewer to ponder what happens after. Shot in black-and-white with no sound, the video brings to mind images and memories of the Latin American 1970s, with its many coup d'états, dictatorships, accounts of torture and killings, and resistant uprisings. However, this history is ideologically contextualized by the appropriation of the piñata figure, which simultaneously points to the era of colonization as the institutionalization of these oppressive forms of violence and the subsequent forms of resistance, cultural translation, and hybridization that were to accompany the de-colonization of Latin America. With these dual references, Notion of Conflict, Dance of the Piñata not only raises important questions about resistance to oppression, but forces us to consider our own position in relation to this.

The sculptural installation Casi Quasi Cinema concludes the second section of the exhibition. Produced in 2006, the installation takes its starting point in Gillo Pontecorvo's renowned film The Battle of Algiers from 1966, which reconstructs the events in Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence against France in the 1950s and is celebrated for its vivid recreation of the colonial war, the anti-colonial resistance, and its organized guerrilla movement.On August 27, 2003, the US Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict at the Pentagon hosted a screening of Pontecorvo's film to its staff members, considering it to be a useful illustration of the problems faced in Iraq. Casi Quasi Cinema is a fictitious model of the cinema, where Pentagon could potentially have screened the film. The model includes benches and a cinema screen onto which the text of a flyer announcing the screening to Pentagon's staff members is projected. Through his focus on the reception and utilization of The Battle of Algiers, Lagomarsino makes visible the connections between a colonial past and an imperialist present. By appropriating Pentagon's comparison between the Algerian War of Independence and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, the work not only points to how history is reused and reread over and over again for reasons of power enforcement. More importantly, it forces us to reconsider whether we can indeed claim that the era of colonialism has ended, or whether "Operation Enduring Freedom" (the official name used by the US government for its military response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States) is in fact an example of a neo-colonialism in the age of globalization.

Those who Control the Past Command the Future - Those Who Command the Future Conquer the Past is concluded with the joint work Waiting for the demonstration at the wrong time from 2003/2007. Installed in the corridor on the backside of the title wall, this large digital color print features two figures arriving to audio document one of the many EU Summit protests in the newly erected Ørestad area of Copenhagen, when Denmark held the EU Presidency in 2002. However, the landscape is devoid of people and the figures have arrived either too early or too late. With a great deal of humor, Waiting for the demonstration at the wrong time gives an accurate picture of the current possibilities for a "counter hegemony." Faced with the right's claim to the center of the political spectrum and its appropriation of leftist goals, concepts, and terminologies, the left in the West appears disoriented and unable to act. The left's current generations have arrived too late to take part in the 1968 revolts and too early to visualize valid alternatives to the current world order. The question arises whether the left of the West should look South for new ideas and new strategies. There, a new left seems to be emerging, which might just be able to deconstruct current representations of a defeated Western left.

Notes

1. Written in 1948 as a critique against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of Winston Smith and his degradation by the totalitarian state, Oceania, in which he lives. In the year 1984, Oceania is governed by The Party, whose omniscient, omnipresent leader, Big Brother, exerts control over his citizens by means of a number of controlling strategies expressed in party slogans. The title of this exhibition is a slight rewriting of one of these slogans, which in the novel reads: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, part 3, chapter 2.

2. Quoted from Charles Esche, "Modest proposals or why the choice is limited to 'how the wealth is to be squandered'," in 2nd Berlin Biennale, Oktagon Verlag, Cologne, 2001.

3. Quoted from Gregory Elliott's entry on ideology in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999, p. 256.

4. The following summary of definitions ascribed to the term historically is based on Gregory Elliott's and M.A.R. Habib's entries in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999, pp. 23-26, 252-57 & 226-28, various entries in The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, ed. Joseph Childers & Gary Hentzi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 84-85, 131-32 & 149-51, and Philip Hammond's essay "Cultural Identity and Ideology," in myweb.lsbu.ac.uk/philip-hammond/1999b.html.

5. Hammond, ibid.

6. My use of the term "supplement" is indebted to Pablo Henrik Llambias' essay "A Supplement to the Danish Welfare State" in Trine Rytter Andersen, Kirsten Dufour, Tone O. Nielsen & Anja Raithel (ed.), Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Art_Station 4: The Book, Aarhus: Aarhus Festival of Contemporary Art 2004, 2004.

CV - RUNO LAGOMARSINO
Runo Lagomarsino was born in 1977 in Lund and holds a BFA from Valand School of Fine Arts (2001) and a MFA from Malmö Art Academy (2003). Working in different mediums such as video, drawing, sculptural objects, and photography, his practice explores how today's political and social environments have developed through different discursive and historical processes, which produce representations and metaphors from which we read and reread history and society. In different ways, Lagomarsino's work analyzes the tensions between universalism as a notion of inclusive humanity and the realities of colonialism and postcolonialism. Lagomarsino's recent exhibitions include: Imagine Action (Lisson Gallery, London, 2007), Heterotopias: 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, 2007), I want to be able to see what it is (Lunds Konsthall, Lund, 2007), Ground Lost (Galerija Nova, Zagreb, 2007), and This is no time for saluting flags (Elastic, Malmö, 2006). He lives and works in Malmö

CV - TONE OLAF NIELSEN
Tone Olaf Nielsen is primarily known for her work as an independent curator and transnational, interdisciplinary projects like Democracy When!? Activist Strategizing in Los Angeles (2002) and Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Denmark (2004). She characterizes her curatorial practice as activist, and her strongly politicized projects explore the possibilities of using the exhibition medium as an activist tool for positive social change. In the spring of 2005, Nielsen joined forces with independent curator Frederikke Hansen and founded the curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion, which in 2006 realized the comprehensive exhibition project Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts for NIFCA, Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art. Kuratorisk Aktion is engaged in a critical practice along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality and merges feminist, queer, and activist informed approaches in order to produce projects that deconstruct white, Western, heterosexual, male privilege within the present world order by raising consciousness on the politics of representation. The collective is presently working on realizing the exhibition projects What's Left of the Left? Rethinking Left-Wing Politics in the Age of Globalization and High Five: Sustainable Development from a Transnational Feminist Perspective. Nielsen currently lives and works in Copenhagen.

CV -- JOHAN TIRÉN
Johan Tirén was born in 1973. From 1998-2003, he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and holds a MFA from Malmö Art Academy (2004). He works primarily with the medium of video, often using interviews both as a research tool and in the final presentation of the work. Thematically, Tirén's work is concerned with the construction of history and ideology and has involved critical studies of various social issues ranging from asylum policies in Europe to xenophobia and racism in Denmark and Sweden. Tirén's recent exhibitions include: Deep Search (Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg, 2006), Out of sight (Verkligheten, Umeå, 2006), We're saying what you're thinking (Manifestations of creative dissent) (Lund's City Hall, 2006), Landscape (Studio 44, Stockholm, 2006), Contribution to an archive (SKISS, Nynäshamn, 2005-06), and Malmö Art Academy 10 years (Rooseum, Malmö, 2005). He lives and works in Stockholm.

Thanks to Elastic, Kristina Glaffey, Morten Goll, Frederikke Hansen, Pablo Henrik Llambias, Elisabeth Molin, and Overgaden.The exhibition is realized with financial support from The Danish Arts Council's Committee for International Visual Art, IASPIS - International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, and Nordic Culture Point.

This Is No Time For Saluting Flags

Runo Lagomarsino -ELASTIC, Malmö, 2006

Av Marianna Garin, curator

Runo Lagomarsinos separatutställning This is no time for saluting flags inkluderar helt nya arbeten. Det är noggrant utvalda komponenter, var och en unik med sin givna innebörd och intagna plats och alla sammanbinds de i en större narration. Konstnären vecklar på ett stillsamt och återhållet sätt ut innehållet av den laddade koloniala historien och dess konsekvenser i vår imperialistiska samtid. Lagomarsinos arbeten har ofta kretsat kring kartor, i vissa fall är de en geometrisk komposition utförda med hjälp av metersystemet fundamentala redskap linjalen, eller med millimeterpapperets precision. Den kartbild Lagomarsino visar oss är abstrakt eller till och med imaginär, den avtäcker en sanning som om den ville påvisa att det inte finns stabila och fasta gränser, det finns ingen evig geografi som inte är motsägelsefull. Dagens sociopolitiska karta modifieras och omritas ständigt av dagens historia och är inte enbart en rest av den koloniala historien. Människor tvingas fortfarande underordna sig maktens arbiträra landavgränsningar, och de förstärkta gränslinjerna i Europa med ödesdigra konsekvenser.

Världskartan upprättas ofta utifrån den imperialistiska dominansens perspektiv. I skulpturen A Message Needs Support from Another Message vänds det perspektivet. Denna minsta beståndsdel leder oss in i utställningens narrativ och positionerar konstnärens subjektiva hållning. Som så ofta i Lagomarsinos arbeten kan skulpturen hänvisas till en konkret plats eller situation, nämligen Gibraltarsundet, fast här i inverterad form. Den har sin utgångspunkt i den uruguayanske modernisten Torres Garcías välkända Upside-down Map, från 1943. En inverterad latinamerikakarta som kommit att bli en slags symbol för Latinamerikas återtagande av sin plats på världsscenen, alltså en revidering av vår tids världsbild.

Kan Europa fungera utan ett "icke-Europa"? Skulle man kunna vända på perspektivet ut- och-in och godta Franz Fanons påstående att Europa bokstavligen var "Tredje världens skapelse"? Skulpturen blir en ingång till flera beröringspunkter. I serien acetonteckningar, Untitled (1-7), är de nya avancerade högteknologiska murarna i gränsen till Spaniens enklaver Ceuta och Melilla upplösta till abstraktion. I likhet med en hägring är bilderna så när som synliga som de är på väg att försvinna.?Kartans position i en politisk diskurs återkommer i videoverket Bringing Politics Down to Earth. I verket avtecknar sig en slags tragisk enmansprocession som försvinner bortåt i bilden, en man håller upp en abstraherad tredimensionell kartbild som långsamt förgörs av eld. Detta återhållna våld som sker i tystnad är hos Lagomarsino ett återkommande element, så som t ex Notions of Conflict, Dance of the Piñata från 2004. I fotografiet G-8 perdona, (English is broken here) upprepas den stilla processionen där en skyltbärare med budskapet "G-8 perdona" (G-8 förlåter), som också går bortvänd in i bildens centralperspektiv. Bilden får oss att tänka på brustna löften och ett västerländskt dåligt samvete, där t e x Latinamerika inte till fullo omfattas av skuldavskrivningen, vad finns det att förlåta? Och vad betyder förlåtelsen? English is broken here...

Anticipated Discoveries är konstnärens egen kartläggning med de olika elementen presenterade som värdefulla fynd i ett vitrinskåp, som likt odefinierbara landområden kan upptäckas av betraktaren. Utgångspunkten för Anticipated Discoveries, är en europakarta med nedtecknade kulspetslinjer av flyktingsmugglare Amir Heidari. Det är hans sätt att förklara smugglingsrutter till Sverige och Europa mestadels från Iran. En del linjer tar omvägar via Singapore, Malaysia och Indien. Flyktingsmugglaren, som medialt är allt annat än en hjälte, utmanar den befintliga kartbildens gränslinjer och återskapar den under andra premisser och lagar. Här åskådliggörs en motståndshandling av en "modern geograf" enligt Lagomarsino. ?I kontrast till detta står den "ärevördige" historiske kartografen Martin Waldseemüller, upphovsmannen till den 500 år gamla kartan, omnämnd i ett citat i samband med Christies auktion av den första världskartan med benämningen Amerika.

En hägring är på samma sätt som kartan en abstrakt konstruktion. Kanske en illusion för en möjlig räddning som i sin tur slår emot en annan verklighet - med sin struktur och sitt språk att underordnas i. Ett annat element är fotografiet där This thing called the state, står skrivet på ett tunt och skört ark i ett kollegieblock som en paradox till den osäkerhet och inre konflikt om det som konstituerar den struktur vi kallar staten. Vilka är de instrument som definierar och håller ihop ett eurocentristiskt maktorgan?

Lagomarsinos uttryck hänvisar ofta till modernismens reducerande och abstraherande formspråk, en strategi hos konstnären för att konfrontera den dominerande västerländska kulturens arv. Det finns en inneboende ambivalens i hans arbeten som är ett medvetet verktyg. Något som kanske hör ihop med att hela den postkoloniala diskursen i sig lider just av en ambivalens eller av inre motsättningar som återspeglas i vår världspolitik. Styrkan finns i spännkraften mellan ett poetiskt bildspråk och de konkreta politiska diskurser konstnären ägnar sig åt.

Runo Lagomarsinos begreppsvärld kan inte heller bemästras, och som betraktare krävs det mod att låta bilderna och språket vecklas ut, men det är just i det mötet som också nya tolkningar kan möjliggöras.

"When one enters language one is confronted by a choice, a choice that contains the political history of the language, the imperial scope of the language and the fact that one either has been oppressed by the language or has had learn to master it. This is why language is not a retreat, not a refuge, not even a place where one makes decisions. It is a place for struggle"
Derek Walcott

A conversation between Runo Lagomarsino and Carlos Motta

Conducted by e-mail in July 2008 (Malmö - New York) for Whitehotmagazine, New York

Carlos Motta:

...Runo, you recently showed me a film classic, which I hadn't seen but read much about: Fernando Solanas' La Hora de Los Hornos, 1968, a radical Argentinean political documentary and communist manifesto that advocates the construction of a just society, free from the forces of bourgeois neo-colonialism and U.S. imperialism. This major work, very characteristic of the 1960s revolutionary movement is a heartfelt outcry for independence. Solanas and his co-screenwriter Octavio Getino went on to formulate what they called Third Cinema, a radical political film practice that ""speaks for the people" and distanced itself from the commercial pressure of Hollywood and uncompromised attitude of European art films from that time. Solanas and Getino hadn't yet lived the atrocities that would soon take over the continent backed by the United States precisely to stop "communist" tendencies. The dictatorship and its violent effects... The following decades would shatter their socialist dreams. 40 years later Latin America is still a "ruled" by neo-colonialist and "owned" by the U.S.

We are both Latin American (I am from Colombia and you are Argentinean) and we are both doing "political" artwork. Although the context in which we work, seems to me to be very different from 1968. Additionally, I live in the U.S. and you in Sweden. How do you see your work work politically? What's your thought of radical aesthetics?

Runo Lagomarsino:

Argentinean poet Juan Gelmán once wrote: "La memoria es una cajita que revuelvo sin solución" (memory is a little box that I stir without solvent). I was very moved, almost shocked when I watched La Hora de Los Hornos for the first time, because of its radicalism as a film, its positions of resistance, as well as for its capacity of analysing history, your history and my history. What impressed me the most was that many of the issues depicted in the film are still extremely current. Watching the film, I asked myself what is its potential today? What has changed in the Latin American context? What is the contingency between colonialism and contemporary Latin America? How is the extreme development of neo-liberal policies and what is the role of the variety of organizations, people, groups, etc. that have produced resistance to this development? These were my thoughts and questions watching the film, more specifically thoughts and questions watching the film 40 years later, in New York, in the U.S., a country that has been (and still is) so present in Latin America.

U.S. presence in Latin America has been a major concern in many of your works, sometimes very direct like in the work the SOA CYCLE, a work about The School of the Americas, but also in the narrative of your current work in progress The Good Life, which discusses the concept of democracy in Latin America.

We have very different approaches to our artistic practice, even though I think our narratives and positions often are connected. You use a more direct documentary strategy and are mostly working with video and I usually use metaphors, abstractions and fiction as an essential tool for thinking and looking at history and its connection to contemporary life.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about John Coltrane's song Alabama, in connection to the discussion of what constitutes a political artwork and what we/I mean with radial aesthetics. Coltrane's song was made in response to the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that killed four young black girls. This song has been a major influence to my work. It is a song that I constantly go back to and "discuss". The way Coltrane "tells the story," a narrative that includes sorrow, anger, grief, and a distinct ideological position is incredible... as someone wrote in the comments to the youtube.com video: This is the BOMB. At the same time, listening to it today sparks a discussion around translation and history, which in some ways is similar to the questions that you pose about La Hora De Los Hornos and its potential today.

Why have you chosen a documentary strategy as you major tool in your artistic practice? And going back to the quote of Gelmán, how do you relate to the movement between history, memory and the present?

Carlos Motta:

I am interested in the methodological differences that you highlight between your and my approach to making "political" artwork and in the historical example you suggest, namely John Coltrane's, which is a very productive one to illustrate that difference, particularly if you contrast his work to that of Fernando Solanas. The former as you imply is a lyricist, his approach is visceral, emotional, and musical. The latter on the other hand is carefully explosive, hyper-rational and essentially an ideologue.

You are right I have chosen to use a "documentary" strategy perhaps more in line with Solanas, because I am primarily interested in the production and analysis of (political and artistic) discourse. The material I choose to work with, in the case of a work like The Good Life, is precisely other people's discourse as articulated in their responses, opinions, political perspectives and personal stories. It is indispensable to me that this content, which I gather on the streets by means of interviewing, is presented as "a document" of that interaction. The political dimension of this work to me lies in the accumulation of these voices, which together may shed some light on the construction (subjective or otherwise) of complex concepts such as democracy, leadership or governance to name a few.

I see the work of memory as a work in the present tense. Historical events, no matter how atrocious, remain buried behind our eyes unless they are spoken about, unless they are constantly re-articulated and re-told. I see my role as an artist in that respect as kind of stirrer of other people's memories to produce current stories, discourses that may instruct to us about the (political) faults of the past.

Most of your works depart from specific events, but often you prefer not to make them public, choosing sentences, words and other elements to stand-in for the events. For example in your work Geometry of Hope, 2007 a provocative sentence that reads:

If you don't know what the south is
It's simply because you are form the north.

You confront the viewers making them reflect about their geographic origin and consider the implications of their oblivion (if your are from the north) or their subjection (if your are from the south). What is your personal relationship to history? How has history shaped your involvement with it?

Runo Lagomarsino:

I believe that the connection to history in my work is often fractured by a number of presences. It is not only "me" who tries to speak through and together with the work, but also an increasing number of voices that are deeply silent or loudly engaged with each other through my work. Different layers in my work are often linked to each other forming specific conceptual maps and arenas. Some of them are systematically and powerfully clear. They pose questions about an unequal world order, about the legacy of colonialism, about the category of "race" and the dynamics of racism. Others are ambiguous and subtle in their level of abstraction, demanding the mediation of analytical categories that provide keys to un-code forms of domination that we are subjected to.

Or to say it differently: The tension between universalism as a notion of inclusiveness and the realities of colonialism and post-colonialism. For example in the work Anticipated Discoveries, 2006 the starting point was an interview that I conducted with a refugee smuggler, a coyote. Simply, his work is to challenge the ways maps and nations have been constructed and regulated. He aid people to cross the borders. For me it was important to reverse the sceptical view that many people have of his work. Today's increasing racism in Europe and the closing of borders makes his work even more needed. But it was also important to connect his work historically and conceptually to other historical geographers and to other narratives. That's why in my piece I created a link between the coyote's mapping and Amerigo Vespucio's. Arguing that his work (the coyote's) can be read as a form of contemporary geography in the legacy of historical geographers.

Near my current work desk I have a reproduction of Goya's The Disasters of War and a picture of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) in Buenos Aires. Las Madres have been very important in the public political life of Argentina, in times of silence they have spoken and managed to provide a counter narrative to the military junta. You have been researching the concept of democracy and its development in today's Latin America, how do you relate this to the different political and social movements of the 1970s?

Carlos Motta:

Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo's 30-year + fight for justice and resistance to the atrocious fate of their sons in the hands of the military in the 1970s is an inspiring example of the kind of oppositional groups that have been born from the countless violations of human and civil rights in Latin America. A similar organization is SOA Watch, which under the visionary guidance of Father Roy Bourgeois have consistently opposed the teaching of torture to Latin American military at the School of The Americas in Ft. Benning, GA. Both of these groups (amongst others) have been very influential to my work. In fact I made a video titled Memory of a Protest, 2007 that documents one of the events against the SOA by human rights organization Kamarikun in Santiago de Chile. This work has been described by the press as being "between artistic creation and documentation," which is an accurate description since I am interested in making works that can live a double life; works that can be used as a form of political documents by the organizations that they represent and that may simultaneously contribute to an artistic dialogue within artistic institutions.

This brings me to a sensitive issue within the art world, which is the relationship between art and activism. While I don't consider myself an activist per se, I do think that some of my videos work as works of protest that seek political justice, if they are presented in the right social context. For example Kamarikun has screened Memory of a Protest during several public events. While I didn't quite make the work for them, they use it to present themselves, which is a wonderful accomplishment for me as an artist. Another example is a video program titled The People: Enemies of the State, the Government and the Army, 2005-2008, which openly denounces the violation of civil rights by governmental institutions and the army as well as insurgent groups. I first presented this work in the framework of the exhibition Urban Concerns at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in South Africa in June 2008, a context that seemed very appropriate as Johannesburg faced a wave of attacks on immigrants seeking work in that country. I thought the content of my videos would speak a common language to the museum visitors and perhaps make them reflect on their city's current daily struggle. It is hard to attest whether this was "politically efficacious" or not but I am sure that the larger socio-political context was the right one.

The People... will be screened next at the European Social Forum in Malmö () an event exclusively organized to reflect on political injustice. Within the framework of this event the emphasis will be on the exposition of content rather than on the articulation of form or narration.

To finish our conversation I would like to hear your thoughts about this issue that is of so much concern to politically engaged artists. Do you think your work is politically effective? How do you contextualize your work for it to be so? Is this even a relevant question for you today?

Runo Lagomarsino:

I agree, the relationship between art and activism is sensitive for many reasons. First, I think is due to the idea that the "art world" (or parts of it) has of the activist scene. Personally, I have always thought that activism is extremely boring. Its politics of everyday life; going to meetings, pasting posters, fighting against the monopolisation of public squares and hiding illegal immigrants in your apartment, etc. Don't get me wrong, these are the very reasons that make this work be extremely important and I respect it deeply. My criticism is more about the interpretation and the narration of activism in the context of art. I often find it to be very romantic. For example, thinking within the Latin American context, it is a movement of interests. First "everybody" was quoting Sub-comandante Marcos and the EZLN, some years later the interest moved on to the Asambleas of Buenos Aires, and now? What is the point of engagement and investigation now?

At the same time I find it important when an artist or his/her work can have a double life, as you call it, or in a sense seeing his/her work in a more organically, breaking the fixed lines between different disciplines, which is something different to the criticism that I was raise here.

I don't find my work activist, or effective but that has never been my goal. I see my work as a different form 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 narratives of the work, and I see these in-betweens as places for political potential. To critically ask and to visualise in which ways we read and re-read history and society is always extremely important. For me fiction creates this possibility, this space for struggle, where the viewers engage from another perspective, a place behind the image. As Derek Walcott eloquently wrote: When one enters language one is confronted by a choice, a choice that contains the political history of the language, the imperial scope of the language and the fact that one either has been oppressed by the language or has had learn to master it. This is why language is not a retreat, not a refuge, not even a place where one makes decisions. It is a place for struggle.

In times when neo-liberalism speaks about an exclusive I, different forms of resistance must create an inclusive We, name the present and dream the future.

Residency Unlimited, interview with Johan Lundh

Runo Lagomarsino was born in Argentina, raised in Sweden and is currently based in Malmö. After studying art at the Academy of Fine Art Valand, Gothenburg and the Malmö Art Academy, he went on to attend the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. His work focuses 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. The exchange between Runo Lagomarsino and Johan Lundh took place between Malmö, Sao Paulo, and New York City over email in March 2010.

Johan Lundh: I want to begin this exchange by asking about your background. You were born in Sweden by Argentinean parents. However, your name doesn't sound Argentinean, in fact, it sounds more Italian to me. Would you mind shedding some light over your personal history?

Runo Lagomarsino: My last name is Italian, my grandfather was from Genoa, and like many Italian families they immigrated to Argentina during the First World War. Lagomarsino or LAGO/MAR/SI/NO (lake/sea/yes/no). The name has never had this division and meaning  (at least I never heard about), but maybe it is an interesting metaphor for the discussion regarding ones background, its importance and implication of how we read and re-read biography and history. Am I Swedish? SI/NO. Am I Argentinean? SI/NO.

One's personal history is always in a state of flux. Things that before I thought were important I today see as something trivial. Like thinking about my last name as a word game: Do I travel by LAGO or MAR? Do I prefer to swim in LAGO or MAR? Is my political interest in LAGO or MAR?

After my parents were exiled from Argentina, they moved briefly to Spain and then to Sweden. That's my background, but it is also the telling of this background. The memory of, and lack of memory of, this journey, and the dreams and fears it brought with it. It's also the view of Alhambra in Granada when I was a kid. The privilege to have two languages as well as the strange moment of forgetting one of them and being forced to learn it again.

In Swedish 20^th century writer Willy Kyrklund's novel Om Godheten ("On Goodness"), the protagonist dies and comes to heaven, where he encounters God. However, God is a crocodile or so it appears. After the shock of meeting God had passed, the protagonist asks him: Why are you a crocodile? God replies: because that's how you see me.

Johan Lundh: This intertwining of historical developments and personal stories seems to be key to understanding your art practice. Several years ago, you made a piece that captures your concern with historical colonial discourse and attributions of identity and language, We all laughed at Christopher Columbus (2003). The work consists of a single slide-projection on a small MDF-board. I have found myself coming back to We all laughed... many times, and it also appears to be a seminal artwork for your practice. Would you mind elaborating a bit on it?

Runo Lagomarsino: It is an important piece for my practice. It connected several thoughts that I was dealing with conceptually, politically and visually at the time. The phrase comes from a popular jazz song; the lyric starts with the line "They all laughed..." so I just change "They" to "We" incorporating myself into the work. Whitout really telling so much about whom this "We" is, or why this "We" are laughing at Christopher Columbus. The work was my way of reflecting on the relationship between memory and colonial project that have influence on the way we understand history, society and culture. In what way is contemporary Latin America's status contingent on a colonial history? Another aspect is the emphasis on the connection between language, translation and time, which I think exist in several of my other works as well.

I was and am still trying to develop an aesthetic language that doesn't follow 'mono-lineal narratives,' avoiding the documentary language that so often is used by artists working with theses topics. I was searching for a conceptual and visual framework that moved in and out through these questions, where precise images and poetic gestures became central elements. Letting the work have heterogeneous possibilities and openness for different and contradictory directions. Where ambiguity is linked to poetry and doubt is linked to criticality, and where the viewers may engage in multiple conversations at ones. My aim was to create 'a place behind the image', where things would seem to be slightly ajar.

Johan Lundh: I have a quote written down in my notebook that I have been coming back to again and again. The quote is for art theorist Boris Groys essay The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction from his book Art Power (2008): "... above all, it is today's artists and intellectuals who are spending most of their time in transit-rushing from one exhibition to the next, from one project to another, from one lecture to the next, or from one local cultural context to another." Over the last few years, you have participated in artist residencies in Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Sweden and Turkey, as well as traveled extensively. How has residencies and travel shaped your work, and do you find it problematic that we all expect to be nomadic as cultural workers?

Runo Lagomarsino: I think there is a difference in the idea of transfer and travel. There is this quote, don't know from whom: "its not so strange that the metaphor 'beautiful as an airport' in never used." First of all, it's the people you meet-friends, colleagues, new friends, new colleagues-that are vital. The moments, the discussions, the walks, the cafés, the bars that I think are the most important part. To move from your own context and see and learn from others, to challenge your view of how things are and should be. Travel as a political space, a space for struggle, is something that I have been interested in for a long time. The idea of places - how they are named and by whom - are central to this creation, a feature that my work mirrors in the historical connections between cartographies of colonialism and cartographies of Diaspora.

I think that different residencies are valuable for different reasons. Some are more focused on production as for example Baltic Art Centre, located in the medieval city of Visby on the island Gotland of the coast of Sweden. Other residencies have been important because of the specific context of their locale. Argentina, in this case Buenos Aires, was significant because it was the first time I traveled to Argentina as a professional, and not just visiting family, it was important as a departure of myself, a movement of the self. Brazil, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, because the cultural production from the manifest of Antropófago as a alternative postcolonial praxis, to the movements and artistic practice such as Helio Oiticica and Cildo Meireles and  the development of modernism in the architecture of for example Lina Bo Bardi and Oscar Niemeyer has inspired my work in many ways.

To answer the second part of the question, I think there is confusion between the concepts of nomadic and traveling as a cultural worker, I don't think it is really the same. The positions of privileges are very different.  Similar to the romantic notion of activism in some art discourse, I think we over estimate our work as nomadic.

"An individual piece of paper from one of the stacks does not constitute the "piece" itself, but in fact it is a piece. At the same time, the sum of many pieces of the identical paper is the "piece," but no really, because there is no piece, (rather, there) is only an ideal height of endless copies"

I think the way that Gonzalez-Torres "stack pieces" work(s) as traveling and as a metaphor for traveling is an interesting departure and position regarding the complex narratives of belonging and nomadic movements.

Johan Lundh: Speaking of the Baltic Art Centre, you just finished a residency there. This was your second residency in Sweden, the country you grew up in and where you still live. I participated in the same program a couple of years back and found it both interesting and peculiar to do a residency in my native country. How did you find this experience?

Runo Lagomarsino: In relation to the narratives of geography and the idea that there are directions in the world despite the fact that it's a globe, I would like to reply by sending you this short dialogue:

Treebeard: I will leave you at the western borders of the forest. You can make your way north to your homeland from there. [Pippin suddenly looks up with a gleam in his eyes.]

Pippin: Wait! Stop! Stop! [Treebeard comes to a stop.] Turn around. Turn around. Take us south!

Treebeard: South? But that will lead you past Isengard.

Pippin: Yes. Exactly. If we go south we can slip past Saruman unnoticed. The closer we are to danger, the farther we are from harm. It's the last thing he'll expect.

Treebeard: Mmmm. That doesn't make sense to me. But then, you are very small. Perhaps you're right. South it is then. Hold on, little Shirelings. I always like going south. Somehow it feels like going down hill.

(Script from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 2002)

In a practical way it was good, I produced a new piece that I have been researching for a while. It has as a starting point the drawings of the marquise in the Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paolo inaugurated in 1954 and designed by Oscar Niemeyer. To me, in this moment in time, to be in a place were there is this focus on production-conceptually and economically-where the institution is flexible and open minded, supports, follows and questions the way a new work is being produced. I found very important, as it can be a very complex situation being in a new place and context producing a new work.

Johan Lundh: Finally, you recently presented one of your largest solo-exhibitions to date, Las Casas is Not a Home (2009/10). It featured both previous and new works and was shown in London and Malmö. It must have been exciting to tease out the connections between different works. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on Las Casas is Not a Home, and what you have planned next?

Runo Lagomarsino: Las Casas is Not a Home is a piece that I have been working on for long time, adding and removing things, almost like the work was an endless notebook. The point of departure for the installation is the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas (1486-1566). He was one of the first and fiercest critics of colonialism, who strongly disagreed with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the occasion of the Valladolid debate (1550-1551), which today is acknowledged as a core discussion of the status of indigenous population. The title of the installation plays with the notion of home and placement, using the double meaning of Las Casas-both as a name of the priest and the word for homes in Spanish.

A central aspect and development for the work was the production and inscription of six photographs from the wallpaper preserved in a village restaurant in Ötlingen near Basel, which became a part of the installation. The wallpaper produced in Paris 1820 by Dufour & Leroy, it was named  "Inca Panorama" and it is based on the novel The Incas; or, The Destruction of The Empire of Peru (1777), by the French Enlightenment writer Jean-François Marmontel. This altered version of the wallpaper was first exhibited in Kunsthalle Basel, in the group show Report on Probability (2009), and later as a solo-show at Elastic in Malmö (2010):

"Lagomarsino traces the history of Latin America by means of fragments, making it possible to move backward and forward in time and to overlap individual stories. The arrangements are reminiscent of school or of scientific categorization: Although they suggest learning situations, they nevertheless leave the information to be communicated to the viewer open. The meaning of the things is connected to the direction of rhizomatous readings - from the journeys of conquering to the current political ambitions of Western countries, from modernist forms back to the art of ancient cultures, from the colonization of South America to industrialization, from the current global currency system back to the effects of the cold war.

In the video The G in Modernity Stands for Ghosts (2009), crumpled pieces of paper in a small cardboard box are lit with a match. The balls of paper are blank, undiscovered areas

Lagomarsino cut out of an atlas. The film ends with them carbonizing completely, but, shown as a loop, the action of the burning begins over. The sequence shows a symbolic act of destruction but also of return: the small box becomes an open coffin that holds the terrae incognitae of the world, which are repeatedly ignited anew. The image of smoke and fire is also connected with the manifestations of ghosts, as the title of the film suggests. Lagomarsino's title refers directly to Anibal Quijano's essay "Of Don Quixote and Windmills in Latin America" (2005). Quijano's text contributes to the current debate in South American cultural studies and social sciences, which is an attempt to reflect anew on the impact of modernity on Latin American society. According toQuijano, that society continues to develop under the preconditions of a colonial discourse on power and under the influence of Eurocentrism. In order to find a way of out this labyrinth, "where our unsolved problems haunt us like ghosts from our past," these phenomena have to be brought to light and used to understand historical experiences so that Latin America can develop a new, self-confident identity."

(Excerpt from the text Slow Explosions, on Las Casas Is Not a Home by Simone Neuenschwander, 2010.)

I have just finished a new piece that will be exhibited in Mexico in April with the title Horizon (Southern Sun Drawing). It's a work that consist of almost 100 small drawings where I have covered a thin line in the middle of the paper creating a line which could be interpreted as a horizon. The papers are then put against the sun in the window of my studio for several weeks. As the sun burns, the paper turns yellow except for the covered horizon. As Avi Alpert writes thinking about the work;

Let's start with a question. Is a line what connects two points, or are two points what are formed when we draw a line? When we think of a line as connecting two points, we think of it as making connections. When we think of a line as creating two points, we think of it as making something new exist. Perhaps a line can do both. Let's take an example. On October 12, 1492, Rodrigo de Triana saw a speck of land in the sea. The empty horizon, the never-ending line, suddenly closed in. A map could now be made. A line could now be drawn. From the Canary Islands to the Bahamas, one could run a pen over a map to mark routes of trade, bodies to be thrown to the sea, the outline of the future. But the line does only connect the points: the line makes the points. There is now an "Old World" and a "New World." Without the line of connection, the points themselves do not exist.

http://www.residencyunlimited.org/exchanges/writer-in-residence/2010/04/runo-lagomarsino/