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Venue
Teloglion Foundation of Art / Thessaloniki French Institute / Museum of Byzantine Culture
Artist
Runo Lagomarsino
 Artists's biography |
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G-8 perdona (English is broken here) photography |
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Three autonomous works, Notion of Conflict, Dance of the piñata; Anticipated Discoveries and G8 Perdona - English is Broken Here, brought together and juxtaposed in relation to each other, but now in one common installation, generate a network of tensions, associations and emotions, relaying issues of violence, migration, exile, colonial and post-colonial societies, geographies and globalization.
Notions of Conflict transforms the Christmas game of the piñata, popular primarily in Latin America, and with complex roots in colonial history, into a sinister, unpleasant and violent game by exchanging the traditional pot-like piñata with a human-like doll, which thus is what the blindfolded figure beats with his/her stick. Many layers of response and meaning are activated to this piece: The blind yet effective violence, symbolically enacted against a human figure; the responsibility of the observer when confronted with violence; colonial history, the violence of which in this piece is turned back onto itself, through the transformation of a play, which originally dealt with missionary practices, to a meditation on the terror extolled in the processes of colonization.
Reversal and negation comes into play in Anticipated Discoveries as well. But here it is the estrangement or redefinition of well-known geographies through the simple mapping of refugee trajectories, in entering – or trying to enter – Europe – onto standard european maps. An assortment of objects, brought together in a vitrine, upsets common geographies, mappings, of European territories: How to acknowledge subversive geographies? How might we represent transformed notions of space through the events of the past and the present?
G8 Perdona – English is Broken Here again returns the question of the displaced, exiled, uprooted, in the wake of so called globalization. With G8 Perdona being the actual text on the back of a T-shirt, this piece actually shifts the position of the viewer towards active intervention or emplacement rather than neutral observation: These are your concerns, whatever your background.
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