Luis Camnitzer (Lübeck, Germany, 1937) is one of the referential artists of Latin American conceptual art. Since 1965 he works mainly with language using different means for the materialization of his ideas. In this conversation with the curator and professor Leyla Dunia he reflects on the dematerialization of the object and the educational practice, in the context of his recent exhibition in the Reina Sofía Art Center Museum.

Abstract

Paul B. Preciado writes in Pornotopia that “the different Playboy houses, in their most utopian tradition, like platonic Atlantis or Thomas Moore’s island, are settled on aqueous foundations”, giving few examples of how human beings have historically resort to fragile, unstable and isolated spaces as refuges for desire and imagination. A deserted island somewhere in Polynesia is the site created by Adolfo Bioy Casares for his novel The Invention of Morel, a place where a fugitive experiences nonlinear time, suffers strange diseases and shares the space with ghosts. In The Stone Raft, writer José Saramago does not invent an island, but transforms the Iberian Peninsula in one by breaking it off the European continent and letting Spain and Portugal freely sail across the Atlantic Ocean.

Light Mint Green brings together the symbolic value and geographic phenomenon of the island, presenting a fictive narration where a floating garden-island becomes the potential answer for an urban nomad. Light Mint Green is the culmination of the research I’ve been developing in the last four years about contemporary nomadism, transience as a space for resistance and the construction of islands with unstable foundations as an allegory to conceptualize space from desire and disidentification.