José Luis Torres: Temporary Territories

The constructions of José Luis Torres evoke the prolonged ambiguity and estrangement inherent in experiences of immigration and exile. Repurposing found materials, the Quebec-based Argentinian artist transforms spaces with large-scale installations that offer possibilities to both see and engage familiar objects in new ways. Collecting and recontextualizing objects of daily life, his DIY architectures point less to home than to informal settlements, where sedentary spaces of stability associated with belonging give way to nomadic spaces of risk and vulnerability. For Torres, this geography of temporary territories offers insight into deterritorialization – the deep transformation of everyday cultural experiences compelled by the dislocation and relocation associated with cross-border movement and migration at both local and global scales.

Integrating aged and discarded furniture – doors, windows, mirrors, and chairs – sourced within the community to preserve their association with local ways of life, Torres uses strategies of reconstruction and assimilation deeply familiar to im/migrants as they shape and are reshaped by new territories. The very simple gesture of “making do” that informs the construction of this built environment belies the profound precariousness of relationships to home, to identity, and to bearings produced by immigration, as well as the essentially ephemeral intersections of object and human biographies through time and change.

Image detail: José Luis Torres, Temporary Territories (installation view), 2023, found furniture