Forever Immigrant, 2017
Untitled (Transparents Flags)#3, 2007-2011
Portuguese artist living and working between France and Luxembourg, accosts visitors, even before they enter the Sucrière.
For the 14th Biennial of Contemporary Art of Lyon, Marco Godinho has reworked his installation Forever Immigrants. The artist has used a stamp on the walls of the exhibition space as well as on the exterior facade of the Sucrière building, which reads “Forever Immigrants”. The inscription, applied by means of an inkpad like those used by bureaucrats, is repeated thousands of times. The imprints are juxtaposed or superimposed, so that they merge and fuse together. According to the point of view adopted by the spectator it is possible to perceive the work by turns as a multitude of fragments or as a whole, while its different occurrences in the spaces refer to the complexity of political and human realities: the separation between interior and exterior, the individual dissolving into a group, or migration as a permanent state for the individual, whether it is voluntary or, as is more often the case, a necessity. Also highlighting the state of non-belonging to a given territory, outside the Sucrière, Marco Godinho presents Sans Titre (transparent flags) (2007-2017),twelve transparent flags made of organza and featuring the twelve stars of the European Union flag.
Written by Water (visible at the Contemporary Museum of Lyon)
The Written by Water project consists of a collection of invisible narratives written by the Mediterranean Sea. Initiated in 2013 at the Bay of Gibraltar, the five notebooks presented here are the traces of actions carried out between 2015 and 2017 in Palermo, Lampedusa, Catania, Taormina and Syracuse. During his travels, the artist plunges virgin notebooks, purchased on site, into the sea by letting each page imbibe and soak up the memory of the water. A genuine library of a writing of the sea, the work of Marco Godinho invites the visitor to discover the poetic traces of his peregrinations at the borders of the Mediterranean, these hinged places on the margin where different tensions are palpable on both sides .