In 1999, Pedro Lasch—only 25 years old—was authorized to occupy the Zócalo of Mexico City. Specifically, he proposed to take the scaffolding previously used to bolster the nearby sinking Metropolitan Cathedral, and reassemble it—empty—in the central square. Winning the support of the capital’s Comisión de Arte en Espacios Públicos (Commission for Art in Public Spaces) for his vision encouraged the young artist to pursue public art.

Over his three-decade career, Lasch’s works assert that “art” acquires meaning through its interactions with its audience, who, becoming necessarily entangled in the aesthetics, likewise become far more than passive observers. Utilizing everyday forms like game rules, instructions, or storytelling, Lasch’s participatory work operates across generations and geographies, with workshops in Indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in Queens, New York, or at the Venice Biennale.

This conversation took place in Mexico City in May, 2024, on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective exhibition at Arte Alameda.

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Jennifer González (JG): For some time, your work has focused on global capital, cultural imperialism and the politics of migration. In the artwork titled McSickle (2003) the golden arches of the commercially successful US hamburger franchise are graphically attached to a golden hammer and sickle floating on a red background—a communist symbol and reference to the flag of the former Soviet Union. What inspired this piece?

 

Pedro Lasch (PL): 2003 was the thick of the so-called post–Cold War. At this time, so many ideologues were saying, the Cold War is over. That’s debatable, but to me it was also a provocation: What separated so many countries through the Cold War, but also what things were actually quite similar? There was a lot of ideological overlap between, on the one hand, the working-class culture of McDonald’s—as capitalist as it may be—and, on the other hand—the accessibility and celebration of everyday life in the Soviet Union. So it was more of a provocation through humor; then and now, a lot of leftists don’t really use humor enough, in my view. And so I wanted to challenge that.

 

JG: The artwork also represented the breaking of national binaries, a kind of graphical boundary crossing. In that same vein, can you speak about your piece Latino/a América? A continental map that shows the two parts of the Western hemisphere, north and south, bears the words Latino/a in the northern half and América in the southern half.

In the US there is a tendency to conceptually cut the continents apart. Your text interferes in that sectioning, emphasizing that America is a hemisphere, not a country, with populations always in movement. The image has become popular, people have used it for T-shirts and tote bags, so it has become itself a migrating artwork. More importantly, part of the work was a social-practice engagement with people who were invited to carry a smaller version of this map folded in their pockets when crossing the US-Mexico border. How do you think about that piece in relation to this question of international movement, international travel, and parallels between different places having to do with class politics or mobility? Could you talk a little bit about this particular iteration of the piece—where people carried the map in their pockets—and then tell us a little bit more about the map on the wall that we have here, this intervention by local muralists?

PL: This iteration to me is quite special, because the scaffold became an integral part of the artwork and that is the first time this happens. I used the red scaffold to paint the monumental map, but we also kept it in the space throughout the show, so that our invited urban artists could keep adding their own work. The same red metal structure was also used to display the paper maps that people migrate with.

 

JG: What is the conceptual importance of this scaffold for you?

 

PL: History is a central part of my work. In contemporary culture, scaffolds on the outside of buildings are seen as a blemish, as a burdensome thing that we have to get rid of. It is a necessary evil for construction. But look, for example, at the history of Mexico’s cathedral: the scaffold would have been there for the 240 years it took them to build it. In most of history, then, the scaffold is more the norm than the exception. So, to me, scaffolds are a symbol of process. And I love process.

 

JG: And a symbol of labor.

 

PL: Yes, process and labor. Of course, Diego Rivera included an image of his scaffold in the San Francisco mural (The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, 1931), so it appears as an emblem of muralism itself and its artistry. From the very beginning, I knew I was part of a social movement for undocumented immigrants’ rights. So as a concept, the work is quite simple. The word Latino has migrated north, that is one way of seeing it. Another way of seeing it is that Latino art has always been there; that is, the US has never been a place without Spanish in it. The US is already a bilingual nation. What happens to the rest of the world when we recognize that?

At that time, we didn’t use the “X” for Latinx, but, rather, Latino/Latina. So, for me, in this map, the O/A imposed over South America is the O/A of gender. But it is also the queering of the continent: because if you think of it in Spanish, the continent is either named América Latina or Latino América, depending on how you say it. But how can the continent have both genders?

To respond to your question about the smaller, paper versions of the map: I didn’t want to just do a work about migration. I wanted to do a work that actually migrated. This is an homage to what migrants have done, not just in the case of the American continent, but throughout history. The biggest transformations of culture are done by population shifts, not by intellectuals. The languages we speak, the food we eat: all those things are basically caused by population shifts.

And so this is a celebration of that. The concept for this paper map that you see here is the idea that each one was carried by people who migrated with it. Each participant got two maps from me, all clean and white; then when they came to their final destination, they would either give one of them to me in person or mail it to me with the wrinkles and stains it had picked up on the way. If you were like my friend Vicencio Marquez—who had to hide in the sewer while the migra came with machine guns pointing at his head—your map looks very different than the one by Julian Zugazagoitia, who was director of the Museo del Barrio at the time, or Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, whose family was crossed historically by the moving border itself over a few generations.

I would intentionally work with people who were known in the community for specific things, often because of community activism. But I knew everyone would cross the US-Mexico border at some point. Participants are not just from one nationality or social class: there are people from Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, as well as Mayan Indigenous people from Guatemala. I also wanted to problematize the whole concept of Latino/a—as a colonial construction. It is not something just to be celebrated. So of course, I want criticism to be part of the work.

 

JG: In the US there is a tendency to collapse “Latinos” into a generic ethnic category, rather than recognizing diverse and complex cultural traditions, including Indigenous traditions, that comprise our continent. Cultural migrations are part of those traditions, before and after the arrival of the Spanish and other European colonists.

Would you tell us a little bit more about the way you decided to work with local muralists for this particular installation in Mexico City?

 

PL: It is the largest work in the show. It takes over this whole wall of what used to be an ex-convent, a cathedral. There is a famous mural here by Federico Cantú that we will see later with the Black Mirror installation, so this is in dialogue with the muralism in the building itself. But also the religiosity of this central space was moving, so I wanted to have something really important here and so did Lucía Sanromán. In the Bogotá mural version in 2009 we invited graffiti artists for the first time to paint over the mural. In those previous iterations, it was all more anarchistic. I loved some of the work and I disliked other work; but, either way, I basically intentionally gave up control. Here we wanted to be more deliberate and do something that we knew would work out, so we did a selection process. We did some research on urban artists, all female, who we thought were exciting—not just in Mexico City, but from across the country.

 

JG: Can you say why all female for you?

 

PL: Too often when we talk about migration, the feminine side gets erased. One of the earliest versions I did of Latino América was actually with lipstick on glass precisely to address this, just through the smell. I basically mashed together piles and piles of lipstick for my pigment. In that case, it became very obvious—just through the smell of the lipstick—that the gender aspect was so important.

Also, the focus has been too strong on jobs like construction, on the labor that men do. Anybody who has worked on immigrants’ rights knows that women are as present and as important, if not more so, in the activism for worker’s rights.

 

JG: I want to pursue that question of materiality, because I appreciate the way you recuperate the everyday object. When we think about questions of labor, production, global capital, circulation, obviously an important part of such questions is the commodity. The whole politics of luxury, the whole politics of ownership: all of these things circulate around the tangible, the material object. And so, in a way, those who want to intellectually free themselves from the object are in a naive position, vis-à-vis materiality.

Although you use traditional materials—painting, drawing, gouache—you also use nontraditional materials and found objects. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the importance of found objects to your work as well, and how that relates to this question of materiality?

 

PL: What I have tried to do—and it wasn’t necessarily a conscious thing early on, but now it is a very conscious thing—is find categories of objects that can exist in art and outside of art.

Take masks: You can use a mask and nobody has to pretend like it is art. And at the same time, the history of art has incredible masks.

 

JG: That is right.

 

PL: The same with maps. Some maps are incredible artistic productions, others are just functional things that we use to get somewhere. Flags are the same. So I try to find these genres of objects that are what I consider hybrid social objects: they can be art, but they easily move between these two spaces.

 

JG: Can you talk about your own relationship to being binational as an artist—coming from Mexico, but spending a lot of your training and student life in the US and becoming a citizen there—and what perspective that gave you? What advantages or disadvantages did that entail?

 

PL: I feel, especially at this point in my life, quite privileged. I ended up getting a great university job, etc., and so the binational life has ended up working well for me. But that wasn’t the case for my first 10, 15 years of professional life.

I was actually incredibly precarious, the years I lived in New York. I literally ended up living under bridges at one point. I waited tables, moved furniture, etc. And of course I’m not the only one. There is a class demotion that a lot of us go through. At the beginning, I was already lower middle class in Mexico; and then, when I got to the US, I was definitely very lower class. I was very fortunate to be accepted at Cooper Union, where I was able to study for free with great people like Hans Haacke, Dore Ashton, Day Gleeson, and Doug Ashford, among many other great people. And so that of course changed my life. But it was very precarious.

When I finished my studies at Cooper Union, I was incredibly dissatisfied with the art world in New York. And so I fled.

 

JG: Do you want to say why?

 

PL: Because of its focus on the commercial. All people wanted to talk about were their CVs and how much they were selling their artwork for. Of course, there were exceptions in New York like the Whitney Program and 16 Beaver; these spaces where we carved out little spheres for political conversation. But it wasn’t the norm.

And so I fled and I ended up doing all these rural workshops for months in southern Mexico, in Chiapas and Quintana Roo. I had no money, so basically I would say, if you give me two meals per day and somewhere to sleep, even if it is just like something on the floor, I will work for eight hours a day. And here’s what I know how to do. I know construction, I know four languages, and at the very bottom I would put, I studied art.

And to my own surprise—in every village for four months that I lived like that—every single community said, let’s make art because that is what you studied. And so it really gave me back my conviction about the importance of art.

And so that is why I went back to the US and that is when I went full swing into creating my experimental arts program in Jackson Heights called Art, Story-Telling, and the Five Senses.

I wanted to do work in the US and in Mexico. But whenever I would deal with the intelligentsia in Mexico, or the art community, nobody wanted to touch the issue of migration. They were completely oblivious; they didn’t realize that half the country had left.

The only people I was able to have conversations with were part of an older generation of artists who totally embraced this idea and work. But for the mainstream of the art world, it really took the immigrant rallies of 2006 for them to get it.

 

JG: Let’s talk about those art spaces. As a public intellectual, as a public artist, can you say something about why it is important for there to be an art space? What does it do, in particular, for people that maybe other forms of expression don’t?

In other words, for you as a maker, how do you see the exhibition space as part of your public intellectual labor, as part of your social practice?

PL: For me, there was a pivotal moment and a massive transformation in how I understood public space, and it happened with my Zócalo piece. This started as a conceptual proposal I submitted to an architectural competition for the Zócalo, the central plaza in Mexico City. I thought it would be rejected, so I intentionally made it this radical piece about covering the plaza with reconstructions of the massive scaffoldings that had been used to prop up the cathedral during its restoration. And then it was accepted! It would have been for me, at age 25, something on a scale that would have changed my career significantly: this was a huge artwork, 300 tons of steel on the most important square of the city, in the country. But eventually, it was blocked by the right-wing government, so it didn’t happen. I went from thinking I would be a major public artist to being no one, back to waiting tables in New York again.

And so, for many years after that, I didn’t want to touch anything that required permissions, or collaboration with the state. I thought, that is not me.

Instead, I worked with my community-oriented projects, my mirror masks and maps and other things to basically do public interventions that would be more like tactical guerilla actions around themes like migration, education, etc.—a type of public approach one can have control over. And so that was my practice for 15 or 20 years.

 

JG: Let’s talk about the mirror masks. What are these masks and what do you do with them?

PL: They are very easy to use. Mostly the masks would be part of workshops that I held in different parts of the world, with high school students in Haiti (2009); Bangladeshi immigrants in London (2010); or activists and farmers in South Korea (2006), to name a few. Depending on where I am and who I’m working with, I do site-specific workshops that are artworks in and of themselves. Basically, if I wear the mirror mask, then you see your face on my body when you look at me. And if we both wear it, then our faces entirely disappear.

I often use the past to address a really difficult issue of the present. So, I see myself as part of a tradition of public intellectuals who are critical of the place that they are in. We work from the belly of the beast.

JG: Your work is about community, yet, these masks seem to hide who we are. One of the goals of the projects is to break down normal social barriers, so that people can form a new sense of community. Can you talk about why the mirror? What does it have to do with your interest in community?

 

PL: Yes. The first website I ever built for my work was called Games, Non-Habitual Habits and Temporal Rearrangements. In those days, I didn’t want to call myself an artist, and the idea of the non-habitual habit is what you are referring to. I like to defamiliarize the familiar through an aesthetic, a gesture. And that, to me, is the artwork.

And so back to the mirror mask. We project so many things onto one another’s faces, such that when we put on the mask, a lot of people want to take it off immediately. Because it is scary. Even if it has been oppressive stuff that gets projected on us—race, gender, age, all of this stuff—still, it’s you. And it becomes part of us, whether we like it or not. And so when all of a sudden it disappears and it is our body that is speaking and not our face … we still have our eyes for empathy, but everything else is gone. We have this open space instead.

And, for some people, that is scary. It erases individuality—temporarily, not permanently—to open a collective space of sorts. But that’s only when everybody is wearing the mirror mask: in fact, these were the first works where it really became obvious that only one person wearing it doesn’t do anything, you need other people to experience the artwork.

 

JG: That is right. And when one person has a mirror mask on and the other doesn’t—then we see ourselves in the other’s body. But there is a displacement of identity, then, that you are interested in. Once, you said something about the mirror mask working as a transformation from portrait to landscape.

 

PL: I realized early on that, of course, I love formalism and aesthetics and art history, and I want my work to be in dialogue with complex and sophisticated reads on that. I also hate empty formalism and art for art’s sake. That has been the land of mostly white men, telling us a very specific story of what art can and should be—and I don’t want to be part of that. So I learned early on that I had to tie something to my formal experimentation that couldn’t be depoliticized, no matter how hard people tried.

Then I started my series of works titled Naturalizations (the name the US government gives to the process of acquiring citizenship). In the workshops, we always use the mirror mask, but we use them in very different ways. Naturalization is a word that we associate with so many things, be it the environment, Marxist theories of the market, or advertising. “Naturalization” is a way to talk about how commodity products are presented to us, as if they fell from a tree (without information about how or where they were made).

But for us immigrants, it means that countries, states, governments have decided to call us “natural.” And this, of course, is really weird. I often ask in my workshops: What are we before we are naturalized? Are we artificial?

 

JG: Or space aliens?

 

PL: Sure. But if you think of it, shouldn’t even aliens be natural—since the entire universe is nature? How did we let the state decide what is and what is not natural?

 

JG: You have also reflected on war, and several of your pieces have developed around current political events.

 

PL: I often use the past to address a really difficult issue of the present. So, I see myself as part of a tradition of public intellectuals who are critical of the place that they are in. We work from the belly of the beast. If I’m in the US, I do critical work about the US, if I’m in Mexico, Mexico. And in this exhibition, I included an interactive artwork based on the Édouard Manet painting The Execution of Maximilian (1867–9), putting myself in that tradition with Manet and many others. (Maximilian, an Austrian archduke who Napoleon III installed as emperor of Mexico, was executed by a firing squad of Benito Juárez’s army in 1867. Manet’s painting was critical of Napoleon III’s imperialist ambitions.) It is a painting that was banned for the first 20 years of its life. People immediately read it as a critique of French imperialism. In fact, it is one of the earliest examples we have, in the modern nation state at least, of a Parisian artist who is against French imperialism and who makes that opposition visible.

JG: Can you describe for the people who are reading a little bit about the performance as a collective practice, and what the masks look like?

 

PL: So it looks like a game, it is intentionally very colorful, very modern, you have all these primary and secondary colors. There are ten figures in the Manet painting, so that is why there are ten masks and ten boards on the floor. These flat floorboards look a bit like skateboards that you can stand on (and people have been standing on them the last six months, you know, constantly). And if 10 people stand on them, you reenact the execution.

 

JG: Is it the actual placement of the people who were holding the guns, and those being shot in the painting?

 

PL: Yes. So if I am to be executed, if I’m Maximilian, I would stand here, you know. Behind the masks are diagrams that show you how to stand. I also of course often like to politicize abstraction and the history of abstraction, so I include painted abstractions related to the 10 positions of figures on the floor.

 

JG: So in the actual exhibition, anybody is allowed to take one of these masks and put it on?

 

PL: Yeah.

 

JG: And try standing in the position of the different characters in Manet’s painting?

 

PL: Yes, and reflect on current practices of imperialism.

 

JG: I see your work in conversation with a long tradition of socially conscious art, a tradition that has different generations in Latin America and the US. What do you think is the relationship between what is called “social modernism” and the term that we use frequently today, “social-practice art”? They don’t seem to be identical, but they are in a kind of lineage relation, perhaps?

 

PL: I think one of the reasons Lucía Sanromán decided to work with me has to do a lot with this question. There are many exceptions, but a lot of socially engaged art and social practice is a rejection of object aesthetics; whereas the modernist artwork celebrates form and it is, you know, overly reverent about that. In my mind and in my work, the aesthetics of the object and that of the social process or relation are not mutually exclusive. 

Featured image: Pedro Lasch, Latino/a América