Yo Tambien soy humo / I am also smoke (2020) is a video of the artist’s father relating the experience of his first cigarette on European soil after fleeing Argentina with his young family following the 1976 military coup.
Yo Tambien soy humo / I am also smoke is one shot tightly framed around an old-fashioned, 1970s-era postcard of Port Vell on the Barcelona waterfront. Christopher Columbus stands atop the 197-foot-tall column in the center of the postcard, pointing dramatically out toward the “New World.” The sea is tinted a too-vivid blue. The tram cars in the foreground are colored in an improbably saturated shade of red. There is a crease in the paper of the postcard that runs through the sky like a shadow mocking the enduring certainty of Columbus’s gesture. On a voiceover in measured, rhythmic Spanish, Lagomarsino’s father intones a story about arriving in Europe that he must have told many times. He sat on a suitcase, took out a cigarette, and decided to forget about Argentina and all the fear and death he and his wife and small daughter had left behind. Just for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
