At Kunsthalle Lissabon, artist Cisco Merel presents 'La Chantin', an exhibition that reimagines the house as a living archive of migration, memory, and survival. Drawing on Afro-Antillean architectural histories linked to the Panama Canal, Merel transforms the gallery into a shifting landscape of mobile structures, suspended memories, and embodied histories. The exhibition features wheeled constructions and vernacular references that propose architecture as fluid rather than fixed, shaped by movement, resilience, and collective experience. Through an open system where viewers' presence alters and reconfigures the work, Merel explores how homes are built, dismantled, and rebuilt across generations of displacement.
The exhibition matters because it reframes the concept of home from a static destination to an ongoing practice of adaptation, connecting contemporary art with underrepresented architectural traditions. By centering Afro-Antillean building histories as forms of survival and resistance, Merel challenges Western notions of permanence and stability in architecture. The work also engages with urgent themes of migration and displacement, offering a poetic yet politically resonant meditation on how communities carry and recreate home through movement. The close collaboration with curator Ana Laguna and the support of Kunsthalle Lissabon enabled the transformation of the gallery space itself, activating new relationships between work, architecture, and body.