Artist focus: Studio Lenca and Giuseppi Rodriguez

With the growing internationalisation of art, it is becoming increasingly irrelevant to define artists according to concepts of historical-geographical belonging and “nationhood”. Instead, Taiye Selasi proposes that the first layer of understanding a person´s identity is where they are “local” to, rather than where they´re from. From there, one can begin to construct a network of layers that give better insights into the displacements and obsessions within contemporary art.  

Those new concepts of layered identities are reflected in an emerging movement of artists of Latin American origin who have become “local” to the UK. They have transcended the imposed expectations of Latin American art, built from a colonial vision that privileges “the exotic”. This over-emphasis on Latin American identity has led to an erasure of the artist´s identity as an artist in their own right, and ultimately overlooks the deeper themes and meanings within their works.

The two artists featured below seem to take distance from the question “Where do you come from”? (which implicitly suggests: “What are you doing here?”). Instead, their art explores an accumulation of experiences that reveal what it means to be “local” to different spaces. In doing so, they push past the otherising and pigeon-holing effect that Latin American art has been subjected to, by inserting themselves more organically within contemporary, global themes. They do not deny their roots, but they show the greater complexity that lies within them and beyond them.

Studio Lenca

Studio Lenca, Los Historiantes 2019

Studio Lenca´s life has been marked by displacement: from El Salvador to San Francisco, and then to the UK, where he has now established his studio in Margate. The experience of uprooting is central to his work, where he uses different mediums- from performance and video, to painting, sculpture and creative activism- to focus on making difference visible. Through this multidisciplinary and multi-layered practice, Studio Lenca finds the creative drive to reinterpret his ancestors in his native El Salvador, expanding beyond to reveal a universe rooted in the history of colonization and its multiple, ongoing effects.

Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez

El olor sexy de las hormonas del crecimiento, New Contemporaries 2021

Based in London since 2019, Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez is a multidisciplinary artist originally from El Callao, Perú, who explores the contradictions and shifting landscapes surrounding concepts of “community”. In 2021, he featured in South London Gallery´s New Contemporaries exhibition, which was followed by his first solo show in London, Opera de Balcón (Cell Projects Space). In 2022, Giuseppi was awarded an artist residency by Gasworks, where he explores the “theatre” of interpreting, processing and tracing lived experience, to decipher the Afro-diasporic histories through video installation, film and performance. It is difficult to categorise an artist like Giuseppi, who moves between the registers of “high” and “low” culture, shifting between mediums ranging from hip hop music to digital art. Giuseppi´s work is constantly evolving and taking unexpected paths that shake our understanding of art and its system of relations. 

Ópera de Balcón, Detail of morse code alphabet, 2022, source: Bryan Giuseppi website

Ópera de Balcón, Installation View, mixed media, 2022, source: Cell Project Space website

Ópera de Balcón, Installation, Detail of Balcony #1 (Malcolm X), mixed media, 2022, source: Bryan Giuseppi website