Juan Duque

No Soul for Sale – Tate Modern turbine hall – UK
Juan Duque (CO, 1974) is an architect, urban designer and artist. He studied Architecture at Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Medellìn – CO), is a Master of Human Settlements at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, TRANSMEDIA (postgraduate in art, media and design) at Hogeschool Sint Lukas Brussels and a Master of research in Art and Design at Sint-Lucas Antwerp. His work as an artist has been presented in Belgium and The Netherlands, Spain and UK; since 2005 he has lived and worked as an independent artist in Belgium, based in the city of Ghent.

Repositioning
Being Colombian and defining himself as a nomad, Duque belongs to a generation which has gradually left Colombia from the year 2000 onwards. This situation of cultural and geographical displacement has become the departing point of his artistic practice. Through his artwork, he is constantly confronting his previous memories with the places he is living in or passing by. Taking the place of an outsider, an observer, Duque questions how the condition of constant displacement allows him to inhabit multiple worlds, multiple places, multiple borders and multiple temporalities simultaneously and reflect this constant physical and cultural re-positioning in his art.

There is an obsessive presence of landscapes in his work; to him, landscape is the result, but also the medium of interaction between dynamics involved in the transformation of everything external to our bodies. He states that 'We are part of the place we inhabit; in a reciprocal way our behavior and memories are strongly influenced by the geographical features of the territory we live in.' He also wonders what the memories (related to the landscapes) are of the people in those places and he wonders how they relate to them. How would it be if he took people's landscape images and memories and made them his own, transformed them?