It's the way home that moves us away

Crossings, comings and goings, departures, returns, and what happens in between, are intertwined into Carla Zaccagnini’s and Runo Lagomarsino’s personal lives and respective works. This exhibition itself is a sort of path, where their trajectories cross and then bifurcate if only to meet again… It is the way home that moves us away... they say… An exhibition in two spaces and in the space in between; a dialogue marked by chance encounters, smoked cigarettes, peregrine words, and transatlantic crossings, which at the same time weave stories of deracination, exile, wandering, migration, loss, and remembrance.

Regn and Lluvia, two works with the same title in different languages, made almost a decade apart in different countries, seem to provide proof that their separate itineraries were perhaps fated to cross. Zaccagnini asks “did we become close after our encounter, or did we meet because we were already close?” And indeed, their personal histories and parallel lives do seem to have led to this fateful encounter. Carla was born in Argentina, Runo in Sweden, their parents, Argentineans descended from Italian immigrants, also migrated: Carla’s parents to Brazil, Runo’s parents sought refuge in Europe. Migration, exile and wandering do not exist in their respective works as subject-matter nor as leitmotif, but as something inherited and indelibly etched into their own lives.

A dialogue between the two artists is staged in two venues that house the two galleries that respectively represent each of the artists, Vermelho and Mendes Wood DM, separated by the length of Avenida Angelica in São Paulo. Linking both spaces is a peripatetic performance, the only collaborative work between the artists in the exhibition(s), entitled Justice is the presence of love in public space, borrows a phrase by African American intellectual Cornel West. During the whole exhibition period, two people will leave both galleries in the direction of the other, each one wearing a t-shirt. One reads “justice” on the front and “in public space” on the back, the other one reads “is the presence” on the front and “of love” on the back. At some point during the walk their paths will cross, and the phrase will come together “justice is the presence of love in public space,” only to break up apart moments later when the performers continue on their way.

Aside from providing the connecting thread between the two spaces, the performance lies at the intersection between the private and the public at the center of this exhibition conceived by two artists with separate practices who share their personal and private lives. Its constituent parts–words, walks, crossings, signs–map a constellation of interests that traverse their respective works: language, historiography – from microhistories to macrohistory – geopolitics, ideology, and the iconography of activism.

This work, originally conceived to be performed with sandwich boards, can be inscribed within the the graphic repertoire of political direct action dissected by both Zaccagnini and Lagomarsino in their respective works. Zaccagnini’s earlier Elements of Beauty (2012) revisited the intertwined histories of art and feminist movements, beginning with a poetic dissection of suffrage activist Mary Richardson’s attack on the Rokeby Venus in 1914. Runo Lagomarsino’s Untitled Echo (2021-2023), reprises the image of the demonstration and the placard, this time in the image of the painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Il quarto stato (1899-1901) held by a protester during a recent manifestation in Chile. Volpedo’s painting, which depicts a scene in which the leaders of labor strike walk forward, presumably to negotiate the workers’ rights, has become an emblem of workers movements. Lagomarsino takes the moment in which it is held up by a protester and juxtaposes it with a blow-up of the original painting; a mise en abyme of sorts, in which both histories, past and present, are recursively inscribed within each other. Sous les pavés, la plage …an anonymous phrase attributed to the student-led revolts of May 1968 immortalized the brick as constitutive of the material culture of activism. While Zaccagnini focuses on the image, the object, and its ghostly trace, Lagomarsino concentrates on the iconic but immaterial gesture. Lying on the floor and wrapped in paper traced with graphite that outline the surface of the bricks inside, Zaccagnini’s Paraparalelepípedos (2023) seem to have landed there, tossed by demonstrators hurling bricks, or Molotov bombs, from the space at the other end of Avenida Angelica, such as Lagomarsino’s protester in Histories that nothing are (2001-2003), whose unfinished gesture is forever locked in a looping sequence.

Tracings, gestures, fingerprints, lists and inventories, are everywhere to be seen in this exhibition as both Zaccagnini and Lagomarsino unpack the idea of the index and its manifold meanings in their works. Zaccagnini’s frottages, not only wrap the bricks that lie dormant in their potential to manifest dissent, but also the outlines of bilingual dictionaries for immigrants to Sweden Cada livro com todas as palavras (2023). The frottages also stand as the spectral presence of the bell clapper in De Bom Parto a Boa Morte (2017) and the sounds of the bells of Minas Gerais, De sino a sina (2017), which are traces themselves of ancestral rhythms transmitted from generation to generation by the bell-ringers of Ouro Preto. Lagomarsino’s Dactylograms (2023) are exactly that, fingerprints; the artist’s own, which he stamps on the reverse of school maps to form different shapes and words, suggesting, in conjunction with the maps on the other side, alliances, world orders, routes, borders. These establish a conversation with Zaccagnini’s World Words, an inventory, yet another index, of words that appear repeatedly on national anthems (soil, earth, land, country, bravery, chains, struggle). Both works perform as indexes of the symbolic construction of a nation state, of the idea of home and belonging related to the land.

Lagomarsino’s exploration of the indexical manifestations of immateriality, in gestures, smoke and light waves, deals with another kind of imprint, one of remembrance and of a journey. Transatlantic II (From Santos to Trelleborg) (2022-2024), tells a tale of migration through the imprint of light and its ability to reach improbable places. After living between Malmö and São Paulo for several years, the artists decided to make the move and finally settle in Sweden, Lagomarsino’s country of birth. Unexposed photographic paper was inserted between the pages of books belonging to both Zaccagnini and Lagomarsino that were then packed and sent from Brazil to Sweden in a shipping container along with their personal belongings. Upon receipt, the papers were developed revealing the index of light exposure but also the imprint of the books inside of which they had been placed; an imprint of the transatlantic journey. Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) (2020), tells the tale of another journey; the exile of Lagomarsino’s parents fleeing the ruthless violence of the dirty war waged by the military dictatorship in Argentina against left-wing dissidents in the mid-1970s. On the screen, the still image of a postcard depicting Port Vell, in Barcelona, and the statue of Christopher Columbus atop a column pointing toward the New World, while a voiceover of the artist’s father recounts the uncertainty of his arrival in Europe and the moment in which, for the duration of cigarette which he smoked while sitting on his suitcase, he decided to forget the fear and death he and his family had left behind.

A small work by Zaccagnini, whose title, Personal, Archeological, and General (2023), could summarize the spirit that pervades this exhibition which goes from the deeply personal to the general and is mediated by archaeological inquiry. A random page from the Illustrated London News, from February 1909 – which contains news of the suffragettes who emblazoned a Zeppelin with the slogan “Votes for Women,” of a factory fire, of the shipwreck of the SS Penguin off the coast of New Zealand, and an article on an excavation site in Rome, with the headline, “Personal, Archeological, and General” – is roughly folded in such a way that it stands on its own and the different news overlap and almost touch each other, “bringing earth, fire, air and water together” in one crumpled page. This sense of historical retrieval, both personal and collective, is at the center of Película hablada (2018-2019), which tells the story of her grandfather’s migratory journeys set against world events as random as those of the creased newspaper page from 1909; World War I, another shipwreck, of the ocean liner SS Principessa Mafalda where her great grandfather died on the transatlantic crossing from Chile to Italy, the actual Princess Mafalda’s demise in Buchenwald during WWII, the history of European immigrants to South America … A history of comings and goings that for Zaccagnini also tells another story that has marked the encounter between both worlds on either side of the Atlantic and informed both artists’ respective interrogations of History, that of a civilizational ethos that opposes “wilderness to civilization, animal to human, barbarism to enlightenment.”