The second part of Latin Elephant’s art public programme Inhabiting Spaces, ‘Right to Inhabit’, consisted of a series of 6 commissioned workshops delivered by 6 Latin American contemporary visual artists, in partnership with South London Gallery and Gasworks, and with the collaboration of Tate. These research-based workshops explored the meanings of inhabiting today while socially engaging with the realities of Latin American communities in the UK.
The series of workshops kicked off at Gasworks on March 2022 with Sebastian Calfuqueo, a Chilean Indigenous Mapuche non-binary artist who facilitated Insubordinate Bodies, a performance workshop exploring the body and resistance from an intersectional perspective. Following, Chilean artist Carolina Illanes presented at Tate Modern Rethinking Inhabiting Spaces, an invitation to reflect on recent transformations carried out at Elephant and Castle’s neighbourhood in London. Subsequently, Paola Bascón led Lithic Encounters, an audio-guided workshop exploring stories about stones from the Andes and the South London Gallery’s Orozco Garden. Meanwhile, Amalia Pica invited everyone to create their own fantastical creatures mixing the architecture of Elephant & Castle and different elements such as plants, objects, and animals.
The remaining 2 workshops were the result of Latin Elephant’s open call to Latin-American artists. The resulting winners of the call were Peruvian-Spanish artist Inés Cardó and the duo composed by blkmoodyboi and La Bonita Chola. The first one, facilitated The Knowledge of Taste, a a cooking workshop that explored food as a form of community-building; while the duo used the workshop to create a poster campaign based on illustration, pictures, quotes, and images to honour the memory of the intersectional Latin communities in Elephant and Castle.
Insubordinate Bodies with Sebastian Calfuqueo
5th March 2022
Gasworks, London
Rethinking Inhabiting Spaces with Carolina Illanes
11th and 12th March 2022
Tate Modern, London
Lithic Encounters with Paola Bascón
21st May 2022
South London Gallery, London
Mutant Buildings and Unlikely Animals with Amalia Pica
28th May 2022
Walworth Library, London
The Knowledge of Taste with Inés Cardó
23rd July 2022
South London Gallery, London
The Collective Memory of Elephant and Castle with blkmoodyboi and La Bonita Chola
30th July 2022
United Voices of the World, London
Sebastián Calfuqueo is an artist of Mapuche origin based in Santiago de Chile. Working across performance, video, ceramics and installation, their practice interrogates the social, cultural and political status of the indigenous subject in Latin America.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Galería Patricia Ready, Santiago de Chile; Galería 80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima; Galería Metropolitana, Parque Cultural de Valparaíso; and MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile. They were awarded the Municipalidad de Santiago Award on 2017 and the Fundación FAVA Award on 2018. They were recognised with the prize Democracy Machine: Artists and Self-governance in the Digital Age awarded by Eyebeam, New York.
Carolina Illanes is a Visual artist and PhD in Arts based in Santiago de Chile. Her work has been developed in both the artistic and the academic fields through the creation of installation pieces that reflect on living and inhabiting the contemporary city. She currently teaches at the Universidad Finis Terrae and Universidad Diego Portales.
Paola Bascón is a multidisciplinary artist working between La Paz and Berlin. She studied media art, design and media philosophy at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG). Her work can be described as an artistic and performative research around ritual practices, storytelling and colonial history. Through performance, installation and participatory formats Paola deals with the understanding of the body as territory, the body as a container of memory and the performative quality of nature. Paola has shown her work in Berlin – Spreepark, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, radialsystem, Uferstudios; Santa Cruz de la Sierra – Galeria Kiosko; La Paz – Museo Nacional de Arte, Alliance Francaise, Casa de la Cultura, Materia Gris; Rio de Janeiro – Largo das Artes, London – Playground, among others.
Born in 1978 in the province of Neuquén, Argentina, Amalia Pica currently lives and works in London. Pica studied sculpture at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts. She did a residency at the Rijksakademie in the Netherlands and has lived in the UK for more than a decade. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Tate Modern in London. Her works are part of important collections such as the MCA in Chicago, the MNBA in Neuquén, the MoMA in New York, the Serralves Museum in Porto, among others. Pica’s practice is focused on aspects of communication, language and cultural intimacy and takes various forms such as sculpture, installation and performance.
Inés Cardó is a Peruvian/Spanish artist based in London, where she graduated from Chelsea College of Arts. Her practice focuses primarily on migration, language, and embodied memory through video, installation, and text. She is interested in the alternative forms of memory that offer ways of escaping colonial epistemic traditions, often using autoethnography as part of her making process.
Blkmoodyboi
I am a visual artist, interested in making vivid, accessible and proletariat pieces of art. I am mainly an illustrator who focuses on creating Queer dissident political art.
I create digital illustrations that depict and archive of Black and Brown Trans people as political agents from the past, present and future as part of resistance and struggle. I am interested in taking space, in engaging people with political thoughts of collective organisation, resistance and memory. I hope to bring joy to all QTIBIPOC people when they see my illustrations and make many feel brave to be in community and collectively create a more fair future.
The Bonita Chola, Angela Camacho
I am a self-taught creative, social organiser and facilitator, my practice involves different methods to engage the community and produce art. I’m interested in archiving the history on women of colour of the Abya Yala, centering, indigenous, black trans femmes, through digital collage, to archive our legacy with dignity and beauty. My relationship with the community is key for my work here in the diaspora and back home with my indigenous siblings. The aim is to always politicise and organise, I believe that art is a tool, a channel to map those thoughts, those intentions with the hope to create a fair world for us and our next generations to come.