This publication has been organized on the occasion of Runo Lagomarsino’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, La Neblina. The exhibition was on view at Galeria Avenida da Índia between July and September 2018. This publication by Galerias Municipais features texts by the curator Filipa Oliveira as well as by Sara Antónia Matos and Pedro Faro.
“Runo Lagomarsino, whose parents left Argentina after the military coup of 1976 to travel to Sweden, where the artist was born a year later, has developed a critique of European historiographical paradigms through a denunciation of the effects of so-called “expansionism” and colonialism. This is achieved throug creative disobedience to epistemic models and narratives, in works that question the permanence of hegemonic monuments, institutions and civilizational programmes. Lagomarsino thus introduces subtle but ironic fissures in the established narratives, capable of shaking the most solid of certainties.”
-Sara Antónia Matos e Pedro Faro
“In his work, Lagomarsino investigates those geopolitical and historical models that determined Western colonial modernity. He examines how North/South dichotomy and colonial heritage continue to structure the society of today and how these inherent and perpetuate nationalist, racist and imperialist traditions and discourses. In his work, he seeks to reveal these structures with a fine and perceptive sense of humor and biting irony. The artist uses metaphors, abstractions and fictions, to destabilise the widely understood concept of history as a set of linear and universal narratives, questioning the way we write and construct history and undoing the dominant concept of world order.”
-Filipa Oliveira
“The basic thesis is the following: “modernity” is a European narrative that hides its darker side, “coloniality”. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality. Hence, today the common expression “global modernities” imply “global colonialities” in the precise sense that the colonial matrix of power (coloniality, for short) is being disputed by many contenders: if there cannot be modernity without coloniality, there cannot be either global modernities without global colonialities.”
-Walter D. Mignolo