Liste 2018

For this edition of Liste, IV is pleased to present a two artists project that deals with relevant concepts such as community, human relations, mythical thinking in contra position with other ideas that belong to the fundaments of modernity, like architecture and social control. Both Carmen Argote (Mexico, 1981) and Carolina Caycedo (London, 1978) have lived the exile and have taken these experiences as a material for their practice. For Carolina, who in actuality lives in Los Angeles, it is important to unveil the crisis permanently suffered by communities that resist to the violent effects of progress and modernization in their territories and cosmologies. Carmen Argote, who also lives and works in Los Angeles, explore the intimate legacies of her Mexican original traditions and nationality, in contrast with the necessity of a constant creation of a new reality.

In this case, we present the pieces from Carolina Caycedo called Cosmotarrafas, a series of hanging sculptures assembled with handmade fishing nets and other objects, collected during a field research in different riverine communities affected by the privatization of waters in Colombia and Brazil. Some of the fishing instruments where given personally to her by fisherfolk who can not use them anymore. The Cosmotarrafas can be read as the cosmos of the person she met and their stories of dispossession and resistance, operating as a connector between community involvement and studio practice.

By the other hand Carmen Argote ́s artistic process has lead to a very personal investigation, using the process of inhabiting as a way to understand her parent ́s immigrant experience and her own immigrant experience as it relates to the interaction between sites in Guadalajara and Los Angeles and the notion of home. Her father mentally inhabited two sites in Guadalajara while living in LA. One was an empty lot where he would eventually build the family ́s house, and the other was the grand-mother house, Mansion Magnolia, where he envisioned himself working. These two sites created for him, and by extension for her during childhood, gave a ever-present feeling that Los Angeles was a temporary situation. Argote has felt the coexistence of these spaces throughout her life. Guadalajara and Los Angeles as cities have been in constant dialogue through memory and the idea of home and identity.