No Lugar (No Place)
Project: Down on the Corner
Curated by: Guadalupe Martínez and Kate Moss
Vancouver, BC, Canada
No Lugar is an artwork that originated in response to a project called Down on the Corner, which featured artworks in the window of a well known coffee shop (Gene Café) in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver. The creation of this piece is a meditation on the concept of utopian places while exploring ideas around utopias, distopias, and pipe dreams in relation to diasporic populations in Vancouver.
As a Mexican artist who is part of a Latin American diaspora living in Canada, No Lugar, presents a sign that evokes places that are needed, places that don’t exist, utopic places, and places of belonging. In Latin America, the concept of utopia is an imported ideology (Thomas Moore) as part of the legacy of colonization. Latin America was a “new world”, a “virgin land”, a place of dreams, that needed to be filled with modernity, faith, and civilization. No Lugar, draws on this specific geopolitical history and legacy. No Lugar is an extension of my text based artworks and research that explore language and art and how they (language and art) evolve inside societies, how they find expressions, and how art and language change over time in and outside of Latin America.
