The table as a meeting place: Latin American artist networks in London

LATAMesa is a curatorial initiative founded by the London-based Argentine duo Carolina Orlando and Pilar Seivane in 2023. Faced with a vacancy in meeting spaces for Latin American artists in the UK capital, they decided to develop a practice that would foster these spaces for connection.

With three curated exhibitions to date, the duo will open a group painting show at Mucciaccia Gallery , London, in March of this year. “Three of the four artists are Latin Americans living in the United Kingdom. The exhibition explores the boundaries between the personal and the collective, reflecting on the relationship between the body and the territory with its environment, history, memory and the subconscious,” Orlando tells Ñ .

The last group exhibition they curated in collaboration with the Intemperie gallery, a nomad between Buenos Aires and London, was And so the broken mend themselves . Featuring work by the six Latin American artists Alejandra Mizrahi , Mara Caffarone and Lulú Lobo , staff of Intemperie; Eilen Itzel Mena, Ume Dahlia and Camila Bra, the exhibition was open at Sommers Gallery, London , until November of last year.

“All the artists brought the idea of ​​techniques, of the manual, others the idea of ​​trauma, mending , amending appeared as a possible union for their practices. They are all works that explore ideas of resilience, adaptation, memory, in materiality and in the artistic gesture,” Orlando and Seivane tell Ñ .

How many actions can be taken to amend what has been altered? “We are also organizing an exhibition for the second half of the year, scheduled for September at an institution in London, yet to be confirmed. In addition, towards the end of the year, we have planned a solo show in Buenos Aires , we are still managing the financing. We would like it to take place in an institutional space, with the intention of moving that same project to London during the first part of 2026,” the duo says about the projects to come.

“Her practices explore the notions of mending, both as a technical act and as a poetic symbol,” says the curatorial text of the exhibition at Sommers Gallery.

What are the gestures that occur in the act of amending? The fluid Latin American identity and the migrant experience appear at the center of the story. Migrant artists, in the broad sense of the term, in motion, artists in physical, temporal movement.

The ongoing negotiation of identity also appears in the lines of the story. What could it be about amending identity? Reuniting with myself, sewing myself together, tying myself together, reuniting one's own materiality with the body, returning the work to the artist, understanding the intangible viscerality that it brings together.

“I would end up believing that I have always been as I am today, but I even remember hatreds and loves that I no longer feel. I fear, however, that changing desires does not change essentially. Perhaps the essential thing is the way,” writes Italo Svevo in some autobiographical lines. How many times is it possible to amend lived experiences in memory, even if they no longer belong to us?

“There was also a harmony in the formality of the works. There is something of the fragility of amending, of building from that precariousness that appeals to the experience of being a migrant,” says LATAMesa, a project that was born with a lunch , the shared meal, perhaps, as the meeting space par excellence.

The exhibition at Sommers Gallery brought together a group of artists who work with different materials that build a continuous gesture between the works. Formal affinities that the eye captures, like the gesture that builds a community, a group of heterogeneous experiences in which a mode of continuity of Latin America is formulated.

The exhibition at Sommers Gallery was a collaboration between LATAMesa and Intemperie, the gallery run by Argentine Gonzalo Maggi , between Buenos Aires and London. Both experiences speak of consolidating a Latin American art scene in the English capital.

“You feel a lot of things –living with Intemperie–, I feel more and more comfortable with this nomadic aspect of the project, I am interested in the constant challenge it poses, the instability, this concept of being outdoors, not having a constant shelter to return to, which is what it means to have a physical space,” Maggi answers the question of how his life and the project of a gallery that, today, is founded on his migrant experience, are linked.

Is it possible to live a life in the open air? Is there any reparation for the choice of life?

“The logic of the project comes from the works, from the artist, it is a space for the works, not works that are going to fill a space,” says the gallery owner. “It is a change of logic that I enjoy, it interests me a lot, to be constantly thinking about what the future will be like, how it will be put together, at this moment, I would not have a project any other way.”