Iván Argote’s Chicago project asks a simple but pointed question: what happens when a monument refuses to stay put? On 12 June, the Paris-based artist and filmmaker’s new mobile sculpture, DIGNIDAD, will begin moving through the city as part of the Floating Museum’s Floating Monuments series.
The work is mounted on a flatbed truck, turning the route itself into the artwork’s frame. Its first outing begins in Humboldt Park, a neighborhood with deep Puerto Rican cultural roots and a public landscape shaped by Division Street, Paseo Boricua, and the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture. The launch is timed ahead of the Puerto Rican Day Parade on 14 June.
Argote, who was born and raised in Bogotá, developed the commission over two years with curator Carla Acevedo-Yates and local Latine communities. He traveled to Chicago to meet with the Floating Museum and to spend time in the neighborhood, where public meetings invited residents to discuss what monuments can mean. At one of those gatherings, he recalls someone asking whether he had ever seen “a monument offered to grandmothers.”
That exchange seems to have sharpened the project’s emotional register. Argote has described DIGNIDAD as a response to dignity, resilience, and the current political climate, including recent deportation sweeps. “The work asserts dignity as a shared condition,” he said. He also noted that after spending time in Humboldt Park, he decided to complete the project in time for the parade. “DIGNIDAD is going to be the very first truck crossing the Paseo Boricua on Division Street,” he said.
The route is expected to extend beyond Humboldt Park and through Pilsen and Little Village, with a possible pass by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Bridgeview. After Chicago, the project is scheduled to travel to Dallas, Minneapolis, and possibly the East Coast.
Argote is already familiar to many New York viewers for Dinosaur (2024), the oversized pigeon sculpture on the High Line. DIGNIDAD extends his interest in public space, but with a more explicitly civic charge: not a fixed memorial, but a moving one, shaped by the communities it passes through.
