"Put oneself in the place of the other" brings together and shares for the first time a series of actions proposed by Spanish artist Luz Broto from 2014 to 2022.
The first action took place in 2014 when returning to her former high school, the artist made a proposition to seventy school students: that every day, for seventy days, they go home from school to a different person's life—to someone else's parents, siblings, pets and pyjamas. For almost three months, they met to decide how it would be possible to carry out the proposal.
Since then, she has continued doing actions in different contexts and geographies (Barcelona, Madrid, Bogotá and La Paz) within domestic and intimate spaces. All of them share the intention of forcing one out of one's own place and into the place of the other: abandon your daily routine so that someone else can occupy it (Metáfora, 2014); swap house keys for one night (CA2M, 2015); empty out your pockets and reveal objectual intimacies (MACBA, 2015); arrange to meet strangers across the Atlantic (Centro Cultural de España en La Paz, 2016); get someone to open up their house to you (FLORA, 2018); receive in your house someone you had forgotten to expect (Museu de Granollers, 2022).
The book includes eight fictional texts from different authors, as if they had participated in the actions, a text by the artist telling the processes of the actions, and a curatorial text that contextualize the project.
Luz Broto's new project, "Swap keys" (Manifesta 14 Prishtina, 2022), is a continuation of the actions presented in this book, wich has been produced by Manifesta 14 Prishtina, Kosovo, and firstly shown in that context from July to October 2022.
Published on the occasion of Manifesta 14.
Luz Broto (born 1982 in Spain) is an artist worksing on site-specific projects, spanning across installations, actions and interventions. She works within each space, evaluating what's there and taking into account the architecture, urban environment, infrastructure or organisational structure, regulations, uses and histories. In doing so, she enacts minimal interventions that change everything. Her site-specific works shifts the way these spaces function and how people behave within them, creating the possibility for new, unexpected uses and relationships.
Edited by Luz Broto and Anna Manubens.
Stories by Sofía Asencio, Jose Begega, Sergi Botella, Paula García-Masedo, Cristina Morales, lrina Mutt, Alex Reynolds, Andrea Valdés; texts by Luz Broto and Anna Manubens.
