This is an interview by the art critic Rosa Queralt with Yamandú Canosa in regard to his 2003 exhibition held in Spain, named La línea h (iceberg), at the Art Center of Salamanca. It was published in the catalogue Premio Pedro Figari (2007–08 award) in recognition of the artist’s career and awarded to Canosa in 2007 by the Central Bank of Uruguay. In the interview, Queralt emphasized Canosa’s ideas regarding landscape as a space belonging to personal imagination. It included strong affective ties with his native country, expressing the “language from the heart” as a significant element in the structure of his landscapes.   

The article from the book/catalogue Premio Pedro Figari (2007–08 award) includes the 2003 interview by the art critic Rosa Queralt with Yamandú Canosa (b. 1954), the Uruguayan artist living in Barcelona since 1973. The interview was done in Spain about the 2003 exhibition La línea h (iceberg) that was organized in Salamanca, where Canosa developed his ideas about the landscape as a space intrinsic to personal imagination. In the interview, he states that the spaces of landscapes conformed to many factors, such as his studies of architecture, subjective influences of his ties in Uruguay, and other memories of neighborhoods and landscapes of his native surroundings. In his landscape affiliation, he recalls the Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer, and quotes her with the following passage, “We are children of the same landscape. Given such a landscape, such the space.” Canosa reflects on the figure of the iceberg as a double metaphor containing visible and hidden manifestations modeling an objective and subjective reality, which is simultaneously linked to the building processes of memory and language. The artist tries to unite linguistic topographies that intertwine subjectivity, so his landscapes transform into maps of changing and contradictory spaces. This way Yamandú locates the “cultural mix” of his work and relates the territories as migrants via nontransferable processes of memory. In his creation, another landscape is created, that of Barcelona and Uruguay, although each project makes them a hybrid and also a subjective space. In Canosa’s opinion, “one thinks about the world imagining;” an affirmation marked by contemporary migratory processes open to different areas of reflection. These processes allow remote observation, where new significance is produced by the Netherlands that enables him to observe his double space of belonging, to Uruguay and Spain, as something threefold.

[As complementary reading, please refer to the ICAA digital archive for “La casa de Amanda,” another text on Yamandú Canosa’s work (doc. no. 1248013)].