Luciana Lamothe

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1975

            The artistic career of Luciana Lamothe, who lives and works in Buenos Aires, seems to revolve stubbornly around the idea of play. A kind of play, however, that hardly resembles a naïve notion of the innocence of childhood. The playful devices presented in different museums, fairs, and biennials around the world are invitations to participate in an experience in which the audience does not enjoy the security of a predictable game: it is rather led to enter an unstable territory, at times dangerous and challenging. Trained as a sculptor, Lamothe thinks and fabricates large constructions that oscillate between architectural morphologies and iron and wood structures conceived to be used and walked through. In this way, she presents her works as mechanisms for the viewer to operate as they walk along unstable footbridges, cross fragile bridges, climb skeleton pipes, and go up steep towers.

            Since her first photos and videos, taken with a subjective camera, she has integrated into her small acts of vandalism the audience, who receives the effects of adrenaline and the vertigo of Lamothe's "attacks" and her escape. Therefore, it is possible to see the artist involved in sudden actions carefully planned: tearing apart an armchair in a five-star hotel, disassembling a toilet cistern in a shopping mall, poking a milk sachet in a supermarket. We see cutters, ropes, padlocks, scissors, and pliers operating on different materials (cardboard, iron, cloth, wood). Beyond the punk affiliation of these destructive episodes, this part of the artist's production has a long-lasting impact on the meaning of her work.

            This focus on the relationship between materials, bodies, and behavior doesn't offer a pause as entertainment does. It arouses the tension of vulnerable situations, of apparently precarious supports, held up by constructive methods that seem to be dominated by improvisation. Her work creates new perspectives, unusual circumstances, and risky experiences. Thus, Lamothe's poetics explores the problem of boundaries, what bodies can do, and the constrictions exerted by the tools and spaces surrounding them.