Museo Moderno
Lamothe Luciana

Lamothe’s art attempts to construct and shape non-hierarchical ties of mutual collaboration between body, architecture, and materials. Her work unfolds as sculptures, photographs, and videos that register performatic actions, drawings, and texts, but also as large-scale sculptures she builds in situ using scaffolding clamps, pipes, pieces of wood, and other construction materials. In her earlier works, Lamothe relates art and vandalism, signaling the vulnerability of the spaces and elements most cherished by capitalist society, namely property and intimacy. In her art’s movements, she strains and collapses destruction-construction transformation in a triple operation. Architecture is a vehicle-channel that makes visible the structures of power, specifically through the perpetuation of verticality in patriarchal society. In all her work, Lamothe invites us to experience instability and vertigo as metaphors for the fragility of those power structures. On formal and conceptual levels, her work both assumes and radically questions the tenets of modernist architecture such as functionality, ornamentlessness, and the aforementioned verticality. Through saliva and urine, the abject, but also sensual, body plays a role in her work. Similarly, the artist boldly proposes the pleasure of “hard sensuality” when she brings viewers into physical contact with the surfaces of metal pipes or sheets of plywood, with their distinctive textures and temperatures. Lamothe is a hacker who hosts in the material-human communion the radical possibility of expanding pleasure to other sensibilities.