LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS IN SPAIN: NEW NOTES FROM AN ONGOING RESEARCH

Before we begin…

As an introductory note to the reader, I would like to clarify that this is the second of three articles arising from an ongoing academic research project. If you have not read the first one, I invite you to do so.

With this series of articles, I aim to trace the successive diasporas of Latin American artists to Spain from the final years preceding the start of the twenty-first century to the present. Like any complex compilation that seeks to account for processes of transculturation and that corresponds to decolonial presents, this research has compelled us to look back in order to analyze the different motivations behind the migratory flows through which many generations of creators have resided here: from higher education and successive economic crises and/or political reasons to more prosaic motivations.

This framework of reflection seeks to highlight the disarticulation or transformation of practices generated within the cultural fabric as a result of contributions—both artistic and intellectual—produced in Spanish territory, which have led to a shift in decolonial and anti-racist dramaturgy within museographic spaces and/or independent venues, as well as within institutional practices.

Mosquera and Margolles: a legacy that leaves a mark

A few months ago at La Madraza of the University of Granada, I noted that the Spanish reissue of Beyond the Fantastic took the pulse of the current interest in criticism produced in Latin America. Beginning this second article by mentioning this historic publication—an anthology of essays on visual arts edited by Gerardo Mosquera exactly thirty years ago—also serves to underscore the long-standing connection that the prestigious Cuban historian and critic has maintained with Spain. That Mosquera (Havana, 1945), co-founder of the Havana Biennial and curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, among other roles, has maintained an intermittent base in Madrid has allowed his influential vision to be reflected in curatorial projects, teaching initiatives, and roundtables in Spain. These include his role as artistic director of PhotoEspaña from 2011 to 2013, his master classes in the University of Navarra’s master’s program, and the countless occasions on which his brilliance has been heard in keynote lectures at public and private institutions between stops on his demanding international agenda.

Another fundamental agent, both in intention and with residence in Spain, is the extraordinary artist Teresa Margolles (Ciudad Juárez, Culiacán, 1963). Since 2009, this seminal creator has been taking the pulse of the Spanish cultural scene, both from artist-run spaces and from major public institutions. Margolles established an intermittent residence in Madrid the same year she shook the Mexican art system by presenting the project ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?), alongside Cuauhtémoc Medina, as Mexico’s representative at the Venice Biennale. The project encompassed several works, including the intervention of the pavilion, which was mopped with the blood of victims of drug-related violence in her native country. Her vast career before and after that moment makes it almost anecdotal to single out only a few of the projects she has carried out in Spain, such as El testigo (The Witness), exhibited in 2014 at CA2M in Móstoles, curated by María Inés Rodríguez, who spent some time here during the iconic Ferran Barenblit era (Buenos Aires, 1968). That project included works as brutal as PM 2010 (2012), which compiles every front page published in 2010 by PM, one of the most widely circulated tabloid newspapers in Ciudad Juárez. The year 2010 was considered by observers to be particularly violent, recording the highest number of murders—3,075. For the 20th anniversary of PHE (PHotoEspaña) in 2017, she presented her project Pista de Baile (Dance Floor) at CentroCentro, denouncing the abuses suffered by transgender sex workers in Ciudad Juárez, perpetrated by the artist Alberto García-Alix.

In 2025 she was commissioned to produce the prestigious public artwork The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, which will remain on view until the end of 2026, marking a milestone as the first time this public commission has been awarded to a Latin American artist. Mil veces un instante (A Thousand Times an Instant) consists of 726 plaster masks of transgender and non-binary people from Mexico and the United Kingdom, paying tribute to victims of hate crimes and inspired by a Mesoamerican tzompantli.

Just a few weeks ago, a major survey of her work opened at one of Latin America’s most important museums, MARCO in Monterrey, curated by its director Taiyana Pimentel (Havana, 1967), featuring at least three powerful newly produced works. And just five days ago, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin announced that it has awarded her the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2026, granted to artists whose work addresses themes such as destruction, displacement, discrimination, suffering, and violence.

It is worth mentioning—connecting this to the previous article, in which I proposed the thesis that Latin American artists have, in some way, changed artistic modes of making, at least in Madrid—that Margolles has articulated, with remarkable generosity and visibility, a platform for emerging creators in a former garage converted into an alternative space in the Usera neighborhood, offering visibility to artists with less extensive trajectories due to youth or origin from other territories.

Performative practices and sound archives: Maculan, Godínez, and León

Valeria Maculan (Buenos Aires, 1968) and Gloria Godínez (Mexico City, 1979) both settled in Spain in the same year, 2010—one in Madrid and the other in the Canary Islands. The Argentine artist, creator of Alimentación 30, a program intervening in the storefront of a former grocery shop on Doctor Fourquet Street since 2014, is represented by Jorge López Gallery in Valencia, and her work is included in Spanish public and private collections, from the iconic Oliva Arauna to the UHM. She obtained a Matadero residency and VEGAP grants in 2021 and 2023, respectively. In 2023 she presented the solo exhibition El lugar viendo at OTR, curated by Claudia Rodríguez Ponga. Last year she participated at Artium in Vitoria with Prácticas performativas. This autumn she presented Lengua de Fuego for Bienal B in Palma de Mallorca, organized by Es Baluard Museu, an immersive textile installation functioning as a scenic device that also hosts activations involving multiple performances and voices from local choirs. The artist emphasizes the importance of the body and live voice for the sonic experience.

Godínez, the Mexican artist based in the Canary Islands, is a researcher and artist specializing in Live Arts. She completed a master’s degree in Philosophy at UNAM (Norman Sverdlin Award, 2003) and a PhD in Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In 2025 she inaugurated the performance cycle Visión y presencia at the Thyssen Museum with Rojo descolonial en la pintura de Vincent Van Gogh, and closed it just 300 meters away on December 12 with the powerful performance Profecías de Tonantzin at the ICME, creating an unspoken link with the heightened visibility of pre-Hispanic cultures in Madrid at the end of the year, foregrounding ancestral knowledge and living languages from Mexican territory. Over her fifteen years in Spain, she has developed research and artistic projects addressing decolonial issues and the role of women in migratory processes, such as Mareas Migratorias México, an artistic intervention on Mexico’s southern border supported by AECID in 2010, and more recently new Rojo decolonial actions focusing on cochineal at Casa Colón in Las Palmas.

A year later, the Cuban artist Glenda León (Cuba, 1976) arrived in Madrid on an AECID research grant. Trained as an art historian, she has moved between dance, sound art, performance, and drawing. Represented for many years by Juana de Aizpuru—she is now part of the roster at Galería Max Estrella—she has exhibited primarily outside Spain, though in 2015 she presented the project Cada respiro at Matadero, curated by Christian Domínguez. In 2019 she presented Mecánica Natural at the 13th Havana Biennial, and more recently, in 2023, Química Celeste at the Amparo Museum in Puebla (Mexico), curated by Diana Cuéllar—another young Mexican researcher based in Madrid since 2012, who also closes the year with an exhibition co-curated with Rodrigo Gutiérrez in Madrid. León is currently participating in the 24th Paiz Art Biennial in Guatemala. It is also worth noting that this year she presented La condición performática, reissued by CENDEAC in the Infraleves collection under the direction of Fernando Castro, 25 years after its first edition, which had been censored at the time.

Object-based practices: Hamilton, Kato, and Dagoberto Rodríguez

Chilean artist Patrick Hamilton (born by chance in Belgium in 1974) arrived in Spain in 2014. In 2019 he participated in Tiempos incompletos: Chile, primer laboratorio neoliberal at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, alongside fellow Chilean artist Felipe Rivas San Martín, in dialogue with the feminist student uprising of May 2018—a project that positioned Pinochet’s coup d’état as the origin of neoliberalism. He was subsequently included in the reconfiguration of the museum’s collection in the exhibition Vasos Comunicantes in 2021. He has exhibited El invernadero Rojo at Conde Duque, by invitation of curator David Barro, and has shown work for years at his Madrid gallery, Casado Santapau. His work is held in major public and private collections, including the Reina Sofía Museum, CA2M Madrid, MACBA Buenos Aires, Fundación Jumex in Mexico, and the Museo del Barrio in New York.

Jimena Kato (Lima, Peru, 1979) trained at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Marseille (ESADMM) in France, specializing in sculpture and video, and pursued studies in art and new media at Sint-Lukas Hogeschool in Brussels. For many years she was part of the group of artists associated with Nave Oporto in Carabanchel. Since her arrival in 2015, she has participated in all the key validation spaces of her generation. With work in the CA2M collection since 2020, she exhibited there in 2021 in Dialecto, a show in which around 250 artists occupied all areas of the center. Magma, her solo exhibition at OTR in 2024, is her most comprehensive presentation in Spain: an immersive three-level installation intertwining the geological and the biographical, bringing together photographic works, sculptures, and videos, combining the materiality of her practice with a profound reflection on memory, territory, and the formation of identity, including explorations of her Peruvian roots of Japanese descent.

Dagoberto Rodríguez (Caibarién, Cuba, 1969), a graduate of the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) and founder of the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros in 1992, has exhibited at the MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim in New York, as well as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Tate Modern in London, among others. Following the dissolution of the renowned collective in 2018, he moved to Madrid the following year. His work combines architecture, design, and sculpture, employing humor and irony to address fundamental issues of art, politics, and society. In Spain he has exhibited in both public and private spaces, from the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque with the project Umbrales in 2022, to several recent gallery projects, including Weather Report at Sabrina Amrani in 2021 and Babel at Hilario Galguera’s Madrid space in 2024. He was the invited artist at ARCO this year at El Mundo’s stand, and for the past few weeks has been exhibiting Arquitecturas de la voz at the Lonja de Pescado in Alicante, presenting several of his latest series, including Gimnasio de Pensamiento, a large crossfit cage conceived as a vast library featuring authors who have accompanied him, from García Lorca and Hannah Arendt to Dostoyevsky. Alongside his presence in Spain, he has developed projects in Latin America, including Retropía at the Miramar Art and Design Museum (MADMI) in 2023, and from his studio has organized numerous group exhibitions facilitating visibility for young artists to consolidate their careers, such as his wife Laura Lis Peña (Havana, 1987).

New women’s voices

Gin Ro (Georgina Rodríguez Ayala) (Mexico City, 1986) studied Industrial Design at UAM-X and earned a Master’s degree in Visual Arts at UNAM. She arrived in Spain in 2017. Her work explores narratives focused on the invisible and the marginalized, often investigating migration, identity, territory, and memory. She held a residency at BilbaoArte, the results of which were later presented in Esquejes. Desplazamientos latinoamericanos at the Instituto de México in Spain in 2022. That project gathered the voices of migrant women narrating their experiences of Latin American migration in Madrid, their uprooting, and identity, in collaboration with collectives such as Territorio Doméstico. That same year she exhibited Oro Rojo at Centro de Arte La Regenta, investigating the current production of cochineal in the Canary Islands; it was later presented at the 20th Biennial of Photography at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico. After a brief stay in Madrid, she is now based once again in Bilbao.

Glenda Zapata (La Paz, Bolivia, 1982) studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in La Paz and Forensic Anthropology at the Instituto Profesional de Ciencias Forenses in Madrid. She arrived in Madrid in 2017, and her first exhibition, El silencio del porcino, took place at the space on Calle Ramón Luján, invited by Teresa Margolles, whom she had met in La Paz. The project addressed the cost of repatriating undocumented Bolivian migrants. She presented the solo project Pánico in the LZ46 program curated by Ramón Mateos at Freijo Gallery in 2020. Since 2022 she has also exhibited on several occasions at La Parcería, a cultural center for experimentation and artistic documentation, and in 2024 she presented the outcome of her MicroMad residency at the alternative space Cómplices. Tiempos subvertidos. Interferencias en el espacio/tiempo del museo is her most recent group exhibition, currently on view at the Museo de América in Madrid until March 2026—a collaborative curatorial proposal in which she presents the work La mandíbula, composed of teeth collected in different locations across Latin America, each bearing a written word that together form a mortuary chant in Aymara. Her practice addresses themes related to violence, the body, historical memory, and social justice, investigating cases of disappearances and human rights violations in complex sociopolitical contexts, such as those of her native Bolivia.

Lorena Gutiérrez Camejo (Havana, 1987) is a multidisciplinary artist who participated in the 11th Havana Biennial in 2012. Since settling in Madrid in 2019, she has exhibited in artists’ studios and presented the remarkable piece Áurea Ignorantia (2022) at the 2nd Ibero-American Biennial of Toro. Three of her installations were also shown in Idos de revoluciones, alongside Maikel Sotomayor, at a temporary venue of her gallery Pan American Art Projects during Apertura 2025. The compositions of her works refer to the cartography of her native country and challenge the totalizing—and therefore reductive—criteria imposed by power.

Hangar and the PEI in Barcelona as points of departure for new beginnings: Cárdenes and Correa

Scholarship programs for advanced training or artistic creation between universities and institutions have historically been fundamental pathways for the flow and development of different generations of artists. While not the only ones, in these two final case studies the two Barcelona institutions served as destinations for the initial landing phase on the Iberian Peninsula. The Hangar residency, founded in 1997—as discussed in the previous article—has provided conditions for development, research, and production for some of the artists mentioned. The PEI at MACBA (as well as the Master’s in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture at the Reina Sofía, in collaboration with the Complutense University of Madrid and the Autonomous University of Madrid, which will be addressed in the third article) has also been fundamental for generations of curators and artists.

Ricardo Cárdenes (Mexico City, 1981) arrived in Barcelona in 2017 to pursue the Independent Studies Program (PEI), on a MACBA scholarship. He later completed a Master’s degree in Comparative Studies of Literature, Art, and Thought at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Since 2019 he has collaborated with the Ràdio Web MACBA Working Group, developing research, interviews, scripting, and editing for the museum’s podcasts. An artist undisciplined in terms of forms and modes of production, he is currently a Hangar fellow. In 2023 he presented A la deriva. Contranarrativas emocionales de la inmigración at La Capella, Barcelona.

Claudio Correa (Arica, Chile, 1972) studied at the University of Chile (BA and MA in Visual Arts) and has been a faculty member at several universities. He arrived in Barcelona in 2018 through a residency at Hangar, where he exhibited Espectros visibles, curated by Alexandra Laudo at El Castell. After three years, he moved to Madrid, where he presented solo exhibitions at Todo por la Praxis and, in 2022, at Nadie Nunca Nada No (Estruendos sin ira), Cruce (Calco de Luz), and the Proyector Festival. In 2023 he received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. His practice develops optical devices and installations using coins and projectors that magnify faces, creating “specters” that question historical identity and the nature of the image, evoking the camera obscura.

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Mónica Sotos holds a degree in Fine Arts from UCM. From artistic practice she transitioned into curatorial practice, specializing in Mexican creators, whom she has promoted since 2000 through her role coordinating visual arts at the ICME. Over the past 25 years she has developed curatorial and management projects addressing issues of territory and gender, establishing bridges to and from Latin America.

She has curated exhibitions within the framework of international festivals of photography, architecture, design, and gender studies; developed lecture programs with artists; moderated roundtables; and taught classes and lectures in several editions of the Cultural Management Master’s program at La Fábrica, the Cultura Curada program at Universidad de la Comunicación (Mexico), and the Seminar of Latin American Studies at the University of Granada, among others. She is currently a faculty member in the MUPIA Master’s program at Universidad Miguel Hernández. As a cultural manager, she has over 30 years of experience, with around 400 exhibitions involving more than 800 artists in public and private institutions.