‘La Chantin ’ at Kunsthalle Lissabon traces migration, memory, and the architecture of survival.
At Kunsthalle Lissabon, Panamanian artist Cisco Merel presents ‘La Chantin ’, his first solo exhibition in Portugal, unfolding the house as a shifting, collective organism rather than a fixed site of belonging. Conceived specifically for the institution, the exhibition departs from architecture as a static form and instead proposes it as a mutable, participatory system shaped by histories of movement and resilience.
The title itself gestures toward layered genealogies. “La Chantin,” a colloquial Panamanian term for home, carries within it the echo of “shanty,” tracing routes of Afro-Antillean migration during the construction of the Panama Canal. These itinerant structures, raised above ground and built to be dismantled and relocated, emerge in Merel’s work as both material references and conceptual frameworks. Here, the house is not an endpoint but a process, continually negotiated by those who inhabit it.
Merel’s installation foregrounds this condition of flux through elevated, permeable structures fitted with wheels and mobile components. Visitors are invited to physically engage with the work, activating it through movement. In doing so, the exhibition translates migratory experience into spatial practice. Each shift generates a new configuration, collapsing distinctions between architecture, body, and collective memory. The home becomes less a place of permanence and more a site of ongoing reconstruction.
Memory within ‘La Chantin ’ is articulated through fragments. Objects such as a carved coconut and a Chinese porcelain doll appear as intimate signifiers embedded within the structures, recalling Panama’s layered cultural histories. These elements evoke the domestic display cabinet as a repository of identity, where personal and communal narratives intersect. The reference to Panama City’s Chinese Neighbourhood further underscores the entanglement of trade, migration, and cultural exchange in shaping notions of home.
Materially, Merel draws on vernacular building techniques, particularly the use of overlapping wooden boards designed to withstand tropical climates. This method, both practical and symbolic, transforms the house into a protective skin that is at once resilient and adaptable. Bright, contrasting colours animate these surfaces, functioning not as ornament but as declarations of presence. They signal an ethics rooted in survival, where ingenuity and aesthetic expression become tools against erasure.
https://www.kunsthalle-lissabon.org/exposicoes/cisco-merel-la-chantinIn ‘La Chantin’, abstraction operates as a critical language through which territory and belonging are rethought. Merel’s practice, informed by his Chinese-Afro-Panamanian heritage, navigates the intersections of folk knowledge and contemporary art discourse. The exhibition ultimately poses a pressing question for a world shaped by displacement and uncertainty: how might we build a home when the ground beneath us is always shifting?
