For his first solo show in Milan, Swedish-Argentinean artist Runo Lagomarsino continued his reflection on the ways in which history—especially histories of migration and colonialism—is inextricably entwined with depictions of space. At the gallery entrance was a blue-and-white enamel welcome sign that read as a warning: DEPORTATION REGIME. The plaque (Deportation Regime, 2015) was elegantly retro, its aesthetic contradicting its harsh message.

The installation that gave the show its title, West Is Everywhere You Look, 2016, comprises nine maps that hung, furled, from the ceiling at various heights and turned slowly on a vertical axis. The space was thus activated by a hypnotic perpetual motion. Because the maps themselves weren’t accessible, the viewer was, in a way, symbolically trapped in a condition of permanent dislocation. But Lagomarsino also unmoored the viewer by foreclosing any fixed relationship to the objects spinning in the gallery. Both of these gestures underscored the mercurial nature of the hegemonic forces that shape the way we categorize and ultimately navigate space.

Circularity and doubt are the critical characteristics of this work, which encourages the viewer to read beyond the territorial and political conventions that typically shape representations such as maps, and to observe geography and history from multiple perspectives. And yet Lagomarsino made these maps inaccessible, seemingly annulling the history and powers of which they are an expression.

On the gallery’s back wall was the neon work Mare nostrum (Our Sea), 2016. In the text-based sculpture, the letter N in MARE NOSTRUM was intermittently transformed into an M, changing the spelling to MARE MOSTRUM (monster sea). The work is an explicit reference to the tragedies unfolding across the Mediterranean Sea and the region’s ongoing migration crisis. This region was also the subject of Sea Grammar, 2015, a projection of eighty slides that all feature the same image of the Strait of Gibraltar. As the series of projected slides progresses, each becomes punctured with an increasing number of holes that displace the image until it is nearly obliterated. These holes might be interpreted as an index of lives lost to the waves. But there is another meaning, one that relates to the essence of difference that constitutes the Mediterranean, a site of both contact and conflict. To whom does the sea belong? As Lagomarsino shows us so sensitively here, power is exerted by drawing boundaries and maintained by the cartographic representations that sanction and naturalize those boundaries. The title of the show expresses a duality. On the one hand, it could be read as decrying the pervasive colonial power of a West that has projected itself onto the world. On the other hand, it suggests we overturn this mode of looking, deconstructing our very concepts of north and south, east and west.

—Alessandra Pioselli

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.