Runo Lagomarsino: Nobody Forgets Nothing

Nobody Forgets Nothing by Runo Lagomarsino examines the quiet persistence of history, both personal and collective, and the ways in which language and objects function as unreliable witnesses – simultaneously revealing and obscuring. Museums, archives, and public monuments claim to preserve memory, ensuring that nothing is forgotten. Yet they are also sites of erasure, their authority shaping not only what is remembered, but how. If a monument stands long enough, does it solidify power? And if a sculpture is removed from its origins, does it still carry its past?

In a new series of large-scale drawings, Runo Lagomarsino explores the fragile boundaries between memory, repetition, and erasure. In these works, the artist methodically stamps the phrase Nobody Forgets Nothing onto paper, layering it until the words dissolve into a dense, intricate surface. What begins as a clear statement transforms into an impenetrable landscape – where meaning is both present and obscured, and remembering and forgetting blur into one. As the words accumulate, their individual significance fades, yet their presence remains – a meditation on memory’s contradictions and the spaces between what is said, seen, and remembered.

Through this process, Lagomarsino investigates the weight of language and the way memories imprint themselves upon us – overlapping, distorting, and reshaping our understanding of the past. The repeated phrase becomes both a mantra and a paradox, questioning whether true forgetting is ever possible or if every experience lingers beneath the surface, waiting to be uncovered. Just as layers of stamped text remain visible beneath these works, buried histories persist in shaping the present. And as the act of repetition builds upon itself, what begins as an individual mark expands into a collective field of memory, a shared space where personal and historical traces merge. 

This tension between permanence and fragility is central to Como Si Fuera Piedra la Arena / As If the Stones Were Sand, a video documenting Lagomarsino’s quiet intervention at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. In this work, the artist discreetly pours sand from the Mediterranean coastline at the feet of Greek statues – an act that is both a return and a disruption. The sand, carried from the shores where these sculptures once stood, recalls their origins while unsettling their placement in a foreign museum. It is a poetic gesture – an offering, an act of restitution, as if restoring the statues' connection to their own land.

The title Como Si Fuera Piedra la Arena / As If the Stones Were Sand is drawn from Jorge Luis Borges’ poem Fragmentos de un Evangelio Apócrifo (1969). The phrase encapsulates the transformation of solid rock into sand, the erosion of time, and the inevitable dissolution of what once seemed permanent. It speaks to history’s fluidity – how power, memory, and meaning shift and reshape across time.

The Greek sculptures, removed from their homeland and displayed in a Danish museum, become a focal point for questions of displacement, ownership, and the narratives we construct around cultural artifacts. The sand – a fragment of their past – insists on their history, quietly unsettling the authority of institutions that frame them as timeless. Like the shifting meanings of monuments, this act exposes how history is never static but always in flux, shaped by the forces that construct, protect, and ultimately contest it.

Monuments are built to assert permanence, yet their meaning is anything but fixed. They exist in a space where reverence and rejection, preservation and protest continuously reshape their significance. While they may seem to solidify history, they are also reminders of its instability – subject to reinterpretation, erasure, and reimagination. All monuments must fall. Some crumble under the weight of time, others are toppled by those who refuse the histories they represent. Like words dissolving on paper, like sand slipping through fingers, meaning is never still. Lagomarsino’s work reveals this fragility, showing how monuments, like memory itself, are layered, shifting, and never truly settled.

What remains is not only what is preserved but also what is erased, altered, or contested. Nobody Forgets Nothing lingers in the tension between presence and absence, between remembering and forgetting – where history is neither wholly intact nor entirely lost. Even in silence, memory persists – layered, shifting, resurfacing, refusing to disappear. Forgetting too is a form of remembering – like a fish circling its bowl, moving not aimlessly, but in quiet persistence, tracing and retracing the echoes of the past.

– Josefine Juliane Wiell