Studio Lenca: Landscapes

David Castillo presents “Landscapes”, Studio Lenca’s first solo exhibition in Miami, where terrain operates as subject, metaphor, and active agent. The show brings together the recurring figures of the Historiantes, rooted in Salvadoran tradition, who become anchors within fragmented narratives of belonging and displacement. Repeated across the canvases, these protagonists form a persistent chorus whose vibrant presence resists erasure.

In the works, figures merge with their surroundings as land seeps into bodies and bodies spill into contours of place, suggesting geography as fluid and porous. This approach resonates amid intensified hostility towards refugees in both the United Kingdom, where the artist is based, and the United States, where he grew up undocumented after fleeing civil war. Gestures echo ritual performances in which history, myth, and movement collapse into embodied memory, producing layered perspectives within the same frame.

Also included is “Rutas”, an ongoing project made with migrant communities that maps journeys into the US through painting. Each participant contributes a work narrating an individual experience, creating an evolving archive of displacement. Framing mapping as a shared, decentralised knowledge system, the project reimagines borders as unstable constructs while affirming multilayered identities shaped by migration.