At Kunsthalle Lissabon, Cisco Merel reimagines the house as a living archive of migration, memory and survival, drawing on Afro-Antillean architectural histories to explore home not as a destination, but as an ongoing practice of adaptation.
18 June 2026
For ‘La Chantin’, Cisco Merel transforms the gallery into a shifting landscape of mobile structures, suspended memories and embodied histories. Drawing inspiration from Afro-Antillean building traditions connected to the Panama Canal, the exhibition proposes architecture as something fluid rather than fixed: a form shaped by movement, resilience and collective experience. Through wheeled constructions, vernacular references and fragments of personal and cultural memory, Merel considers how homes are built, dismantled and rebuilt across generations of displacement.
In ‘La Chantin’, the house becomes something flexible and shared rather than fixed. How did this idea shape the way you approached the exhibition and how people interact with it?
In ‘La Chantin’, the house is not understood as a finished object, but as a condition in transit. I was interested in shifting the idea of home from something fixed to something relational: the house as something that happens between bodies, as a temporary agreement activated the moment someone moves through it. From there, the exhibition is conceived as an open system, where the structures do not impose a single form but remain available to be reorganised.
The viewer does not occupy a passive position; their presence alters the work, reconfigures it, and destabilises it. Each movement introduces a variation, a new possibility of interpretation.
In this process, the support of Kunsthalle Lissabon and the close dialogue with curator Ana Laguna were fundamental. The freedom they gave me to intervene in the space allowed the exhibition not to adapt to the site, but to transform it, activating new relationships between work, architecture, and body.
The work draws on Afro-Antillean building histories linked to the Panama Canal. How do these histories influence how you think about architecture as both survival and resistance today?
Afro-Antillean architectures are forms that learned to survive before being seen. They emerge from urgency, but persist through memory. I am interested in this silent intelligence: building with the awareness that everything can move, that everything can be dismantled. In this sense, the house ceases to be merely a shelter and becomes a strategy, a form of resistance that adapts without disappearing.
By adding wheels and inviting movement, the structures become like bodies in motion. What does it mean for you to connect architecture with movement and lived experience in this way?
When architecture moves, it breathes. The wheels are not a formal gesture; they are a statement: the house also migrates. The structures become bodies that carry history, that move without a fixed destination. In this movement, something closer to the lived experience of inhabiting emerges – where everything is in transit, even what we believe to be stable.
The exhibition reflects an ethics of survival, where making do becomes a creative act. How do your materials and use of colour carry both practical and political meaning?
Working with what is available is a form of thinking. Materials do not arrive empty; they carry a memory of use. Clay, wood, colour – each responds to a necessity, but also to a way of affirming presence. Colour appears as an insistence on existing, as a gesture that resists erosion. The practical and the political are not separate; they merge on the surface.
Personal and shared memories seem embedded in the structures. How do you balance individual stories with broader cultural histories in the work?
Memory in these structures is not linear. It is fragment, accumulation, echo. There is no single story, only layers. The personal does not stand apart; it dissolves into something larger.
In some pieces, this relationship becomes more intimate: there is a window that, when opened, reveals an image of the sea with flashes of light. For me, this gesture attempts to capture a suspended moment—almost like a memory that does not fade, an internal image that persists.
In other works, small Chinese porcelain figures appear – objects that evoke displacement, travel, and nostalgia for other places. There is also a small sculpture made of coconut, a form that resists definition, resembling an animal but never fully becoming one, as if it belonged to another time or another logic.
All these elements relate to what are known as china closets – domestic vitrines where porcelain and objects brought from other territories were kept. These objects, once foreign, became part of Caribbean popular culture as amulets, as fragments of displaced memory. The work builds from this: from the accumulation of stories that do not share a single origin, but coexist within the same space.
Your practice brings together vernacular building methods and industrial techniques. How do you work between these without losing the depth of local knowledge?
Between the vernacular and the industrial, there is no rupture, but rather a friction. I am interested in the point where inherited knowledge meets another system of production. It is not about translating one into the other, but about allowing them to coexist, to tension each other. From that tension, a way of making emerges that does not fully belong to any one place, yet is charged with all of them.
‘La Chantin ’ explores ideas of home shaped by displacement. How does abstraction help you approach these themes without becoming too literal?
Abstraction is a way of not fixing meaning. It allows me to speak about the house without closing it, without reducing it to a recognisable image. In that displacement, home becomes more of a sensation than a form – something that is intuited, something constructed through experience rather than representation.
The exhibition asks how we rebuild a sense of home in uncertain conditions. How do you see this question extending beyond the gallery into everyday life?
The question of home is never resolved. It repeats. It reconfigures itself. ‘La Chantin’ does not propose an answer; it proposes a state: that of constantly rebuilding. What happens in the exhibition is only a reflection of something that takes place outside, where living means adapting, moving, starting again. In the end, the house is not a place – it is a practice.
This exhibition was on view at Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon, Portugal, from 18 March until 30 May 2026.
