Las Casas Is Not a Home / 2008-2010

Installation with photography collages, objects, sculpture, video, drawings, prints and shelves
Variable dimensions

Las Casas Is Not a Home brings together several recent works concerning Lagomarsino's analysis and recontextualization of historical colonial discourse and attributions of language and identity. The starting point is the debate in 1550 between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda concerning the moral issues at stake in the Spanish Conquest of the "New World". The exhibition creates a narrative in multiple parts that unfolds the links between this fraught colonial past and its repercussions in our own equally fraught geopolitical present. This narrative, a reexamination of history presented in drawings, collages and sculptures, reflects upon how historical processes have influenced the way we read and reread history. The title of the exhibition plays with the notion of home and of placement using the double meaning of Las Casas both as a name and also the word for homes in Spanish.