Turistas, since 2010

Turistas is a photographic and performative series in which Iván Argote turns his attention to monuments, public space, and the subtle power relations embedded within them. In these works, the artist appears interacting physically with statues and commemorative figures—hugging them, leaning on them, kissing them, climbing them—through gestures that are at once affectionate, awkward, irreverent, and deliberately out of place. By adopting the role of a tourist, Argote introduces a figure usually associated with leisure and innocence into spaces charged with historical authority. 

Rather than confronting monuments through destruction or direct critique, Turistas operates through tenderness, humor, and bodily proximity. The series disrupts the solemnity and distance that monuments traditionally demand, revealing their vulnerability and their dependence on collective belief. These gestures transform symbols of power into fragile presences, temporarily disarmed by intimacy. The tourist’s body becomes a tool to question who monuments are for, how they are activated, and how history is performed in everyday life.

Through Turistas, Argote proposes an alternative way of engaging with contested histories and inherited narratives. The works suggest that closeness, play, and affection can be forms of political action, capable of unsettling dominant representations without reproducing violence. The series reflects the artist’s broader interest in disobedience through softness, and in reimagining public space as a site where meaning can be renegotiated through the body.

The Turistas series is held in major international public collections, including the Museo Reina Sofía, Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim Museum, underscoring its significance within contemporary debates on monuments, memory, and public space.