Reading Letters from My Friends

After making drawings of his Los Angeles friends in 1976 and documenting the drawings as a slide installation, Lamelas further experimented with the representation of social networks and location in Reading Letters from Friends, which was exhibited at his solo exhibition at Centro de Artes Visuales in 1978. He asked acquaintances to send letters to Argentina during the most troubling years of the dictatorship and had them read aloud before a camera. Collective language and action destabilised 'pure' information. Although video documentation of the readings is now presumed lost, they provided a haunting and explicit political context for a meditation on memory and migration.