Independent Brussels Runo Lagomarsino

Mendes Wood DM has the pleasure to present a solo project by Swedish-Argentinian artist Runo Lagomarsino at Independent Brussels 2017.

 

Images sometimes (as people) disappear
Images sometimes (as people) come back to life
The impossible just takes a bit longer (says the alchemist to his material)
The impossible just takes a bit longer (say the Mothers of Plaza De Mayo to the shadows of the past)
Hope and Fear are the geometry of the alchemist (Alchemy as in Victor Grippo’s potatoes and as in August Strindberg’s celestography)
Can you make Argentina from an exile point of view?
The exodus of an image by repeating it
Materiality - The reproduction of an image, as in Marxism theory? Or as in finding the essence of the image (the History) by its reproduction - Or both
Extracting silver from Argentina.
 
This black and white photograph was taken onboard of a moving ship while travelling from Argentina to Spain, in 1976. My mother, father and sister are in the picture. This is the ship in which they exiled, leaving Argentina after the military coup d'état in 1976. The year after, in  1977, I was born in Sweden.

The name "Argentina" derives from the Latin argentum, meaning silver; a noun associated with the silver mountains legend, widespread among the first European conquerors of the La Plata (also The Silver, in Spanish) basin.
 
Black and white photographs contain silver. The same photograph has been copied over and over again, saving the used fixer to extract the silver left in it.
 
The title is a quote from Margarete Duras' book L’Amour (1971).
 
 
Runo Lagomarsino (b. 1977, Sweden) lives and works in Malmö and São Paulo. 

Lagomarsino recent solo exhibitions includes They Watched Us For a Very Long Time, La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes, France (2015); Carla Zaccagnini & Runo Lagomarsino, Malmö Konsthall (2015); Lacuna, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2015),  Against My Ruins, Nils Stærk, Copenhagen (2014). Recent group exhibitions includes Descent, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2016), The Artist, Moderna Museet, Malmö (2016), The World’s Futures, the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Really useful knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); Under the Same Sun, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); The 30th São Paulo Biennial – The Imminence of Poetics (2013); Untitled – 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).