The below text was written by curator Julio César Morales for the exhibition.

“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”

– Donna Haraway, Staying with Trouble

After the last statue falls, broken apart limb by limb, with it the reminder of the power of the oppressive colonizer finally fades away. In that place, imagine a surrounding landscape that is a speculative account of the future. Approaching the environment as a living ruin whose palimpsest of political erosions lays now on gardens where nature has taken over, covering pieces of the statues, encouraging new ways of looking at the spaces in and around us. The sole purpose of the broken statue is now to be a holder or container in which wildflowers and plants live and thrive and which points toward different possible futures.

Activations and engagement are at the core of Iván’s practice. In the artist’s latest intervention, Au Revoir - Joseph Gallieni (2021), he focuses on the statue commemorating French military leader Joseph Gallieni. The prominent memorial in Paris’ 7th Arrondissement was the site of protests by anti-racism activists who aimed to bring to light the massacres that took place under Gallieni in French colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

For Au Revoir - Joseph Gallieni, Argote orchestrated an elaborate hoax to encourage further debate around the topic of removing public monuments. Without permission, but acting the part of a city sanctioned worker in an orange uniform, he hired a crane service to park a truck next to the statue so he could climb up while hired extras, who appeared to be civil servants or politicians, waited below. Next Argote placed ropes around the statue. As soon as Argote gives a “thumbs up” the camera stops recording. Then, the footage is sent to Barcelona to a group of animators and special effects designers. Working from a 3D scan of the monument captured by a drone, Tigrelab digitally removes the statue. With the resulting “removal,” the artist created a public debate using Fake News. Argote was influenced by Orson Wells’s seminal live radio broadcast drama War of The Worlds (1938) where he famously convinced listeners that Martians were attacking and invading New York. By the end of the day, more than twenty-thousand people viewed Argote’s video. Word reached the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who sent a staff member to the site to confirm whether or not the statue was still there. Argote released a statement, saying “My intention with Au Revoir - Joseph Gallieni is to create the possibility of that day that has not yet come, but that will come.”

Together, the works in A Place For Us offer radical propositions for building equitable spaces, or as Argote reminds us, “If we want a common future, we need to be fearless and hopeful.”