Lizi Sánchez: Between the Lines of Language and Belonging
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
Lizi’s work lives in the spaces between speech and silence, between what is meant and what is misunderstood. “I work with an expanded idea of drawing,” she says, “one that escapes the wall.” What begins as a line often becomes an object, installation, or sculptural whisper. Her materials, tape, paper, thread, acrylic, are delicate but insistent, holding contradiction without collapse. Her practice dwells in the overlooked: the fragment, the hesitation, the trace.
Originally from Peru, Lizi arrived in the UK by chance. She came with her partner to Glasgow, eventually settling in Bristol and then London, where she completed her MFA at Goldsmiths. It was in artist-run spaces and research collectives that she began to understand the ecology of contemporary art in the UK. “I wanted to understand how artists organised themselves, how they related to institutions, how they created space for one another.”
Her training at Goldsmiths added a layer of critical engagement to her practice, but her work remained guided by personal registers: memory, language, miscommunication, and the quiet violence of translation. “I am interested in what does not quite fit,” she says. “In what slips between categories.” She resists the urge to make work that is easily legible, preferring instead a slow, layered process of reading, feeling, and unravelling.
A través, todo pasa, todo sigue, Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano (ICPNA), Lima, Peru, 2024
Over the years, her relationship to identity and Latin America has experienced subtle shifts. “For a long time, I did not want to be defined as a Latin American artist. It is the same today, I just want to be an artist,” she says. “However, after so many years, I find myself wanting to speak in my own language again. To connect closely with those who have gone through similar migrations.” What once felt like a professional liability has become a source of grounding, not as a category, but as a shared lived condition.
A través, todo pasa, todo sigue, Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano (ICPNA), Lima, Peru, 2024
Reflecting on the debate around the categorisation of “Latin American art” versus “art from Latin America”, she wonders how we can describe the work of visual artists from the Latin American diaspora. It is not produced in Latin America, nor does it always align with what is traditionally framed as Latin American art. For her, this position opens up a different kind of conversation, one shaped by distance, dislocation, and the nuances of living and working in the UK. Communication, a core theme in her practice, becomes a way to explore the feeling of not quite fitting in, whether linguistically, culturally, or structurally. “The work I make now”, she adds, “is not completely in dialogue with what is happening in Peru. I am having another conversation, one shaped by where I am now, but still, in a meaningful way, connected to my origins.”
Among her projects, a distinctive initiative with artist Martín Cordiano stands out: Museo en Residencia, a nomadic “micro-museum” founded in 2020 that travels in a suitcase and comprises pocket-sized artworks donated by visual artists from Latin America and beyond. Conceived as a response to the movement restrictions during the pandemic, the project is rooted in ideas of mobility, exchange, and care. “If you donate a piece, you become part of it, you can curate, take it elsewhere, exhibit it. It is about care, not capital,” she explains. In a system often structured around scarcity, Museo en Residencia insists on mutuality, openness, and collectivity.
Her practice is not about scale or spectacle. It is about subtlety as resistance, about occupying the margins, not as a lack, but as a method. In her hands, softness becomes structure, and small gestures become sites of meaning. Lizi Sánchez is not interested in offering fixed answers; she is asking us to sit with the ambiguity, to feel our way through the gaps, and to listen to what remains unsaid.
Lizi Sánchez was born in Lima, Peru and lives and works in London. She has MFA in Fine Art, Goldsmiths College (2007), London, UK. Her interests revolve around the communicative power of language, the fracture of various communication systems and codes. She investigates how different processes, contexts and intentions transform the use and meaning of language using materials from the everyday environment.
