“I don’t want to be seen only as a Latin American artist”
This interview is part of the series "In the Making: Conversations on Latin American Art in the UK".
Research, Interviews and Writing by Raquel Gonzalez Eizmendiz
Curatorial & Editorial Direction by Gabriela Román González & Mónica Núñez
Francisca Sosa López: Languages of Home
For Francisca Sosa López, being an artist is not a label easily adopted; it is a position earned through years of making, questioning, and slowly carving space. “Everyone knew I was doing something visual,” she says, “but it took me seven years before I could call myself an artist.” Today, she defines herself as a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and collaboration. Yet the medium is secondary to the constellation of concerns that hold her work together: home, memory, migration, and making.
“I divide my practice into three,” she explains. “It is all about being at home, feeling at home, but from different depths.” First, she thinks about home from her migrant perspective. The Million Project, an ongoing body of work in which Francisca draws one bag for every Venezuelan migrant, began as a response to her own feelings of displacement and has grown into an epic visual archive, now counting over 445,000 individual bags. Each bag becomes a small gesture of recognition, a quiet accumulation of presence. “It is absurd,” she says, laughing. “I will probably die before I finish.”
The Million Project
While migration forms a large part of Francisca's own narrative, her relationship with home is equally defined by her deep connection to the craft traditions of Venezuela, where she explores the history and culture of her homeland through collaboration with artisans. This work stems from personal reckoning. “I studied my bachelor's abroad, but when I was at elementary school, in my own country, I was not taught much about it, not our history, not our culture. And yet my whole practice is about Venezuela. I felt the need to learn, not from books, but from people. From their hands.” Rather than appropriating craft traditions, Francisca positions herself as a collaborator, one who amplifies rather than alters. “They are the masters. I just think about how to present their work in a way that is read as contemporary art without changing what they do.”
The third and most introspective layer of her practice is studio-based painting. “Painting is where I return to myself. It connects me with what I loved doing as a child.” For Francisca, the studio is more than a workspace, it is a site of emotional grounding. “It is where I feel at home. It is where I enter a flow state.” Embroidery, colour, gesture; each element is imbued with a quiet intimacy that reclaims domesticity as a source of power.
Pa estar guindando, mejor caer, installation part of InBetween (2024) at V&A East Museum
Francisca arrived in London in 2018 to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. Since then, she has built her visibility through artist-run spaces, friendships, and a growing web of support. She speaks with affection about her network, from professors and peers to curators and collaborators, but she is clear-eyed about the structural challenges. “Being an artist is already hard. Being a woman artist, harder. Being a Latin American woman artist? You are navigating so many layers.”
She resists boxing in. “I do not want to be seen only as a Latin American artist,” she says. “That is not the whole story.” She is critical of how both the Venezuelan and the UK contexts project narrow expectations, from kinetic abstraction to indigenous aesthetics. “People imagine completely different things depending on where they are looking from. And it is rarely what I am doing. So, part of the work is also educational, showing another image, another history.”
Francisca Sosa López’s practice is quietly radical because it subverts expectations of what art should be. It does not conform to the commercialized art market or the rigid categories placed upon Latin American art. Instead, her art creates space for introspection, labor, and memory, challenging the art world’s desire to categorize or commodify. It does not shout, but it insists. It insists on the value of care, of labour, of learning. For Francisca, home is not a fixed, static place but something constantly reimagined through her practice, through collective effort, and her engagement with others. In this sense, her work is a reclamation of space, both physical and metaphorical, where the concept of home becomes a site of resistance and empowerment.
Francisca Sosa López is a Venezuelan artist based in London, with an MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art (2020). Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, embroidery, sculpture, and installation, exploring materiality and process as means of communication. Deeply influenced by the social and political situation of Venezuela, her work reflects on crisis, migration, and the intimate poetics of form.
