Iván Argote

I studied cinema and graphic design in Colombia. Then, at the age of 23, I started working in a production company as an assistant director. I was under a lot of pressure and I had a lot of people to manage. I felt so grown up! And yet I was a baby. At that time, I joined an artists’ salon, and quickly integrated an exhibition, without ever having studied art. For this first experience, I had created a work made out of 7,000 photographs, very small ones. I was a bit particular at the time (laughs).

Yes, I still am but I am easily distracted, which compensates… I think! Anyway, it was around that time that I won a prize which consisted of a plane ticket to anywhere in the world, and a small box of oil paints, which I have kept as a symbol. I told myself I was going to take advantage of this ticket to go and study art. At first, I was thinking of the United States, but I come from a family which is politically committed, left wing, and let’s say that we didn’t really like the “empire” at the time (laughs). But the real reason is that I was leaving with my savings and I wanted to learn French, so I turned to Paris. My first contact with France was the Gare du Nord. It was amazing because I thought I would arrive in the “first world”, in a clean, efficient, white Europe… and I discovered the diversity of the city of Paris, which I found quite cool to be honest.

I met Emmanuel in 2009. I met him at an opening and I went to talk to him directly. I wanted him to take a look at my work. He told me that he honestly rarely looks at the work of artists who are still students. But I still tried my luck by sending him a “message in the bottle”, an email. I think what got his attention was my very natural approach. I am Colombian and relations in Colombia are less codified than here. He was also impressed, I think, by how quickly I learned French, so he ended up calling me back and offered for us to work together. At first relatively slowly. End of 2009, I had my first real exhibition at the Salon de Montrouge, then one in Miami. I then moved to New York and eventually came back here where I set up my workshop and my team.

16 years already! With periods abroad, in Rome and New York. I also worked on several projects in Latin America. This part of my career was very active until Covid, when the institutions came to a stand still, like everything else. I am represented in a gallery in Sao Paulo with which we will resume some projects next year. In particular the Biennial of Cuenca in Ecuador. I need this connection with Latin America, even though I live here. When I’m there, social interactions are different. You have to be there to develop contacts in order to get real commissions.

I think it has to do with my artistic practice which works well there. My work is very political and mixes genres, moving from performance to painting, to actions in public space. I also produce sculptures and films that deal with fairly lively societal issues in Latin America and the United States. In Europe, they are still somewhat silent. They exist in society, but state institutions are still very reluctant to take on these issues.

I don’t know if I would say it like that. But let’s say that the discourse on these social issues is more widespread in the United States. Of course, we have to put things in perspective, the United States has Trump and its supporters, a whole world that we forget about when we live in big cities. But in these cities, the debate is out there in the public space, for example there are more open and broader discussions on the issues related to African-Americans, the question of Queer or issues of decolonization. These topics seem to have been integrated and ingested for a longer time, in particular in regards to the art market. It is possible nowadays to refer to them without being excluded from the art market, it is even these works that work, with real appreciation from galleries, collectors and public art. In Europe, approaching these topics can mean risking your career. Or, to the very least, finding yourself  confronted with fairly conservative comments.

I have indeed been working on these issues for a very long time, in particular those of the decolonization of the public space and colonial heritage. I did not initially give it a specific name because I wanted to talk as much about what happens in the public space as in the individual soul. “How did we build this acceptance of the past in our inner selves?” From this originates our inner relation to domination. We live in a society of domination, at the level of states and empires, but also at the individual level in a persistent class logic. I therefore see with a good eye that things are moving. Young artists are right in the heart of these subjects, to the point of sometimes being on edge. Surprisingly, I have had many invitations as… an expert (laughs). As my work has become known around these matters, it may seem natural to call on me, and I find it rather nice. In any case, I don’t feel like I’ve been sidelined, nor do I feel like I’m at the center of the debate. And I like it as it is.

Yes it comes naturally, but I learn new things. The confluence around these topics comes from all fields, from music, humanities, politics and even economics. It has allowed me to meet people who work on these subjects, and whom I am only meeting now. Everyone has followed their path on their own, and we only meet now, which creates a new and collective discussion.

Yes indeed. These are in particular Françoise Vergès, Seumboy, who is the youtube creator of the channel Histoires Crépues, or Hélène Cixous, who is a writer. With the exhibition for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, I wanted to create dialogues. The framing for the prize is always a little tight, especially in the context of a competition. It’s a great gratification for a foreigner but above all an incredible opportunity to have a space in the center of Paris, in a major institution like the Centre Pompidou. So I wanted to create an important and unique project for this space in particular, a real story around the exhibition. The exhibition as such consists of a trilogy of films documenting three pieces of work, one in Madrid, one in Rome and one in Paris, each referring to three national monuments.

My proposal to the Centre Pompidou was to set up a schedule of conferences about traditional art. The complexity of the Marcel Duchamp Prize is that the nominees are four artists who often have nothing to do with one another, which makes the production of a curatorial program rather complicated. So I designed a program for my room space by financing three different “talks”. First with Françoise Vergès and Seumboy then with two writers Laura Nsafou and Michael Roch. For the third one, I literally moved mountains to bring in two representatives of Colombian indigenous communities who managed to remove a statue of a conquistador installed at the top of an Indian pyramid. I like the idea of ​​showing this example in the heart of Paris. Colombians talk about this subject with such gentleness, such wisdom, they even came to the museum to harmonize energies. It is a diverted way to talk about subjects being discussed at this very moment in French society and the room at Pompidou has therefore become a place to meet for people interested in these subjects.

Here I present the project which I worked on at the Villa Medici, when I was in residence in Rome. One of the films begins with an anecdote about my arrival in Paris. I was offered to sleep in the same bed as a certain Thierry… terrible story, but which eventually led to me living with a friend of the family, also an artist, and who immediately took me to the Louvre. I didn’t really know what to expect, I had just arrived in Paris and it was the first time I had left Colombia. So I was very naive. The first thing I asked myself was, “How did they manage to bring all this here? “. Why are all these objects found in the center of Paris, while in Colombia, it is very difficult to bring our national heritage together in a single museum. And so I discovered that everything was kept in big museums like this. I had the same reaction seeing the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde: finding one here seems normal to all passers-by, but coming from Colombia, it is surprising to say the least.

“What does it mean, in practicality, to have an obelisk on the Champs Elysées? What use do we make of it?” Then I realized that it was recently renovated for the 14th of July parade, so that it would be in good condition for .. the military parade! Which means that it remains in fact in a certain military logic of domination and power, as it was at the time of the pharaohs, a symbol of strength, something very phallic.

Romans were indeed among the first to bring obelisks back to Rome. First with Augustus, then with the papacy and the Medici. In short, France finally followed the movement, with the one in Concorde. At present day Rome is an astonishing city, in which the layers, the eras, the arts mix all in one which is actually quite awkward. I like to see the clumsiness of power, when everyone wants to add something to what was done before. When I arrived in Rome, I wanted to work and reflect on this subject, and I was given the beautiful studio of Indre at the Villa Medici. It is a beautiful place but the access makes it difficult to do sculpture because it is at the top of a hill.

Yes, I decided to resume the 2D work that I had left aside. I already knew that I was going to do two exhibitions simultaneously with the Prize and I really wanted to work on a speculation of a distant future. This is how I thought of the exhibition, by reflecting on a world as it may be in several thousand years, when Humanity no longer exists. This approach helps me to take a step back on subjects such as the ecological emergency. You never know where things will end up. The obelisks are not in Egypt, they are here. The ruins, in my works, become pink, soft and bucolic landscapes that transmit a kind of melancholy of human disappearance. The plant begins to regain ground, and the film presented is funny. It features pigeons from the future who live in dystopian cities, and try to remember what men used to be like.

The figure of the pigeon is marginal, unloved. And yes, the exhibition is fiction. The films presented at Pompidou are also science fiction of the present. Something like a fake threat. This is what I did with a statue of Gallieni installed near the Invalides. He is a man who theorized the “Politics of Races” which was put in place in the colonies. His statue is carried by four women, four dominated continents. We worked with Françoise Vergès on the simulation of the removal of the statue. In the United States, many statues move, we talk about it on CNN, in the media. Here, that is rarely the case. So we all dressed up as workers, we rented a crane that we placed without authorization at the Invalides and we simulated the removal of the statue using special effects. Then, we collaborated with the magazine Regards to make a fake article about the event, like an article from the future.

I think there would have been more media coverage. Eventually, it all went downhill very quickly. I was contacted by several media outlets, but there was little public debate. The goal was to start a political conversation, which didn’t really happen. Europe is very much defined by its heritage. While the very idea of ​​heritage is often invented. In England, we talk about the tree under which Newton would have picked up the apple and invented the basics of physics. But in reality this tree is not from the same period, and we only started talking about this anecdote 30 years after his death. So it was more hearsay than a definite truth. I wanted to make a film about the way in which these heritage stories are constructed, using obscure arrangements. The construction of stories is justly named, it is a construction. In the United States, history is younger and it is therefore less difficult to talk about it or to transform the public space, which is less sacred. In Europe, public opinion is outraged when a statue is removed… of a person whose story they actually don’t even know. There is a certain idea of ​​heritage in Europe. What I try to do, with my work, is to address this subject, with a way of diversion but above all, without judgment.