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May 13, 2014 – Review
Runo Lagomarsino’s “Against My Ruins”
Sophie Goltz
“On a Critique of Spatial Reason” could be the subtitle of Runo Lagomarsino’s current exhibition “Against My Ruins” at Nils Stærk. Upon entering an old factory hall, the gallery appears quiet, and in an almost overwhelming way, the works are conceptually ordered. But after leaving the space, the spatial order shifts towards a space of capitalist realism and its violent power until today. Throughout the twentieth century, entire generations have been articulating social rage by inventing anti-capitalist countercultures and movements in culture and politics. The pivotal moment is when one must finally clash with the dominant order such that only its shards remain to testify against the system’s presumed invincibility. But how can anger be articulated both as a passive stimulus-response scheme, and as an expression of active resistance against hegemony? What would aesthetic resistance as a form of anarchy within the space of artistic practice actually look like?
Lagomarsino’s video More delicate than the historians are the mapmaker’s colours (2012–13) offers us one key example. Like a one-finger-salute, the artist and his father throw raw eggs at Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli’s El nacimiento del Hombre nuevo [The Birth of the New Man], a monument that was originally built in commemoration …