‘Seeing Through’: Migration, Home-making and Friendship in Lourdes Castro’s Work of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract: In the late 1950s, Portuguese artist Lourdes Castro migrated to Paris, where she lived until the early 1980s. This article examines the role of migration and transnational encounters in the construction of Castro’s artistic trajectory, with a particular focus on the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, it explores the triangulation between the artist’s cosmopolitanism, the way space is materialised in her work of the 1960s and early 1970s – especially through the mobilisation of transparency – and processes of making and unmaking ‘home’ in contexts of dislocation. By analysing the interconnectedness of home and migration in the work of Castro, this article aims to contribute to the shaping of historically situated narratives of cross-cultural encounters within and beyond artistic communities whose mobility, temporal configurations and network articulations challenge any fixed and clear-cut division – or impermeability – between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ in late modernity.