The Migrant Object

Guillermo Olguín’s interest in the phenomenon of migration stems from his own experience, as the child of a European migrant mother in Mexico.

The artist has travelled and lived in different parts of the world and understands himself to be a migrant artist even in his own place of origin in Oaxaca, Mexico, itself both a source and site of international migration.

This project, carried out during Guillermo’s residency with MOMENTUM-LAGOS, is constructed from interventions of objects collected from flea markets, including in Berlin, among them discarded photo albums and landscape paintings reflective of the artist’s interest in European Romanticism.

These canvases and photographs can themselves be understood as foreign objects, moving in territory and in time, and carrying with them the stories of those who owned them or are represented within them.

Other canvases included here have been worked on across continents, traveling with Guillermo’s “valise de peintre” and, like the artist, transformed on the journey. These works found their final form during this Residency.

Echoing stories of migrants he has lived with, interviewed and observed, the work references the passage of travellers moving North through Oaxaca from South and Central America, Asia and Africa, part of an intensifying phenomenon of global migration.

The finished works speak to the experience of the migrant, the newly arrived, the melancholy and strangeness of unfamiliar landscapes, vegetation, fauna, climate and culture.

These images echo characters, emotions and realities that Guillermo has lived on his own journeys.

They sit within decades of investigation by the artist and are at once his own response to Berlin, in the last throes of winter and the first days of spring, and a reflection of this European capital’s mutable and multicultural nature.

– Luis Carrera-Maul & Frank Jack

.