Artists

Ortiz, Luis

Flowers Beneath Our Feet, 2022
Foto: Gabriel Rossell Santillán

Luis Ortiz has engaged with migration, body, landscape, and racism in different textual and visual forms. Throughout his work, the artist links people to their bodies, to their memory of territories, to contexts of transnational mobility as well as to the juridical injustices which racialized people face in Germany. In this sense, Luis Ortiz theorizes migration as a process of tension which would be the opposite of complete detachment; migration would not go hand in hand with a progressive forgetting in order to become. Rather, migration would be a process of complex political becoming in which territories overlap; in his work, Luis Ortiz represents a process which is contrary to the hegemonic discourse of national integration, in the sense that such a discourse diminishes the integrity of the
human being. Instead of a mutilation of the human, the artist follows the Obuntu principle of “I exist if you exist” and stresses the need to live with the territory. An example is his project The Mountain Travels, which is related to the landscape in Colombia: even if far away, a mountain can be embodied because migrants carry their memory through images of
landscapes. Thus, body and territory are not just connected, but they also travel together. Despite this, Luis Ortiz also shows the opposite side of this process by working on how bodies and landscapes have been and are still fragmented by racism, laws, state policy and capitalist extractivism. As mountains are emptied of their minerals, as well as of their plant and animal life with the sole aim of delivering materials to the industries in the Global North, immigrants are pressed to deliver their work force and are constantly confronted with decisions on identity and belonging. Luis Ortiz denounces these politics of extractivism and fragmentation but not without describing how a process of continuity and reconnection takes place simultaneously when the mountain, the place and the self are constantly re- structured - again and again.

Text: Andrea Meza Torres

Luis Ortiz has engaged with migration, body, landscape, and racism in different textual and visual forms. Throughout his work, the artist links people to their bodies, to their memory of territories, to contexts of transnational mobility as well as to the juridical injustices which racialized people face in Germany. In this sense, Luis Ortiz theorizes migration as a process of tension which would be the opposite of complete detachment; migration would not go hand in hand with a progressive forgetting in order to become. Rather, migration would be a process of complex political becoming in which territories overlap; in his work, Luis Ortiz represents a process which is contrary to the hegemonic discourse of national integration, in the sense that such a discourse diminishes the integrity of the
human being. Instead of a mutilation of the human, the artist follows the Obuntu principle of “I exist if you exist” and stresses the need to live with the territory. An example is his project The Mountain Travels, which is related to the landscape in Colombia: even if far away, a mountain can be embodied because migrants carry their memory through images of
landscapes. Thus, body and territory are not just connected, but they also travel together. Despite this, Luis Ortiz also shows the opposite side of this process by working on how bodies and landscapes have been and are still fragmented by racism, laws, state policy and capitalist extractivism. As mountains are emptied of their minerals, as well as of their plant and animal life with the sole aim of delivering materials to the industries in the Global North, immigrants are pressed to deliver their work force and are constantly confronted with decisions on identity and belonging. Luis Ortiz denounces these politics of extractivism and fragmentation but not without describing how a process of continuity and reconnection takes place simultaneously when the mountain, the place and the self are constantly re- structured - again and again.

Text: Andrea Meza Torres

Flowers Beneath Our Feet, 2022
Foto: Gabriel Rossell Santillán