I am also smoke is bound up with exile and the loss of a stable sense of belonging. It signifies the release of arriving after a long and uncertain journey and tasting the air of a foreign city for the first time in a place where you know you will have to survive, somehow, once you finish this cigarette. This is smoking as a ritual of resistance against crushing reality: futile, self destructive, and irreverent. Violence lurks in each semiotic fragment of Lagomarsino’s work without ever totally undermining the sincerity of his subjects’ relief at having escaped a brutal revolution.