'PAISAJE ANTROPICO', XIMENA GARRIDO LECCA EXHIBITION IN LONDON

exhibition views at the gallery

and a few days ago in the studio...

Ximena uncovering the fountain

and Cheney with Ximena


press release:
Ximena Garrido-Lecca
Paisaje Antrópico
21st March – 5th May 2012
Private View: Tuesday 20th March 2012

For her first solo exhibition at Max Wigram Gallery, Ximena Garrido-Lecca will install a number of individual sculptural pieces that combine elemental realism and heightened symbolism to conjure a sense of place. From a working fountain, a video projected onto a solid architectural mass, through to a barrier or wall made from flattened oil drums, Garrido-Lecca invests in the way that sheer physicality is able to carry associative history.

By manufacturing and manipulating elements into rough and practical likenesses, Garrido-Lecca uses a form of translation where existence carries historical and cultural power. In response to the actuality of place, through the manipulation and manufacture of the symbolic, the use of found, natural references and other elements, she harnesses a range of associations with Peru’s political and social past and present. Playing with the physicality of place Garrido-Lecca institutes a subtle game between description and implication.

A video of the annual Toropukllay celebration that takes place around Independence Day in the highland villages of Peru, is a central distillation of an iconic power struggle between a huge condor and a bull. The bird sewn to the beast, pecks at its back while the bull staggers furiously around the square in what is also known as the "Blood Festival". The combination of documentation and symbolism, along with the separate and distinct sculptural elements, acts to mirror centuries of struggle between the indigenous peoples of Peru and colonial Western power.

Ximena Garrido-Lecca (b.1980 Lima, Peru) now lives and works in London. Her 2011 solo exhibitions include El Porvenir, Mimmo Scognamiglio, Milan, Italy and a solo project presentation at Frieze Art Fair, London, via Revolver Gallery, Peru. In 2010, Ximena Garrido-Lecca had her first solo exhibition, The Followers, at Civic Room, London. Thus far in 2012, Ximena Garrido-Lecca has been in the group show, The Curator’s Egg. Altera Pars., at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, UK. In 2011 her group exhibitions include, What?, at Mimmo Scognamiglio, Italy, as well as the online exhibition, No Color in Your Cheeks Unless the Wind Lashes Your Face, curated by Timothée Chaillou. Most notably, in 2010 Garrido-Lecca was part of Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, as well as Identity Theft, Mimmo Scognamiglio, Italy.

http://www.maxwigram.com

http://www.ximenagarridolecca.com/

'PROYECTO PAIS', XIMENA GARRIDO-LECCA STUDIO VISIT, THE CRUMBLING ASTHETICS OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT

The Walls of Progress

Ximena Garrido-Lecca

‘The Walls of Progress’ is the title of an ongoing project, a series of 16 walls, which is an investigation into the social phenomena and visual imagery found in adobe brick walls in the highlands of Peru. These walls are very often used as canvases to exhibit a series of hand painted murals that contain propaganda. Some of them display political content, in which diverse parties promise progress and development through a series of slogans and logos. Others promote and sell diverse consumer products, using striking fonts and colours. They are renewed and updated every season pending developments on the political landscape of the country.

The interest in the work is to point out the tension between old traditions of brick making and modern ideas of consumer capitalism. The process of making adobe bricks involves a huge amount of physical labour, mixing earth and straw with bare hands and feet, shaping them with wooden moulds and leaving them to dry in the sun for weeks. Using this natural material ties in with indigenous ideologies, which assert the up-most respect and religious veneration for nature and the earth as a life giving force. The walls blend graciously in the amazing scenery and provide a shelter to protect them from the forces of nature itself.

The collision between this ancient method of building and the modern tactics of advertising, project the reality of how these rural areas are gradually becoming part of a globalised world. It also portrays a sterile promise of ‘development’ and a ‘better quality of living’ in a country that has suffered the detrimental consequences of colonialism and imperialism through a corruption and the ever-present shadow of the Western world.

The gradual crumbling of the walls represent not only the idea of a soon-to-be extinct past, but the future of a new order, made of concrete landscapes. The murals expose the ongoing false promises of progressive change through the juxtaposition of such slogans and imagery onto a background that can barely hold the words themselves.

'Poyecto Pais', which translates into 'Project for a Country' or 'National Project' was a small political party in Peru, which today mostly no one remembers, and which participated in the regional and presidential elections of 2006. Due to the lack of political followers, the party retired itself from the elections a few days before the elections, and the party disappeared.

In the fake adobe wall constructed by Garrido-Lecca, the national project shows its fissures and begins to crumble.

Ximena Garrido-Lecca was born in Lima, Peru in 1980. She lives in London.

Garrido-Lecca will exhibit 'Proyecto Pais' at the Frame section of the Frieze Fair with Revolver Gallery.

Visit Garrido-Lecca's website: www.ximenagarridolecca.com

See Garrido-Lecca's previous project, exhibited at Saatchi Gallery, here.

XIMENA GARRIDO-LECCA'S 'THE FOLLOWERS' WITH TEXT BY RODRIGO QUIJANO

Ximena Garrido-Lecca, 'The Follower', 4.57 x 11.69 x .27 mts, 2010
installation view at Saatchi Gallery within the exhibition 'Newspeak, British Art Now, Part II'










Saatchi's Pantheon of new British based artists




Ximena Garrido-Lecca
The National Still Life
By Rodrigo Quijano

In the troubled ebb and flow of the heterogeneous contemporary realities of Peru, death has always occupied a central place. Not only because of the sixty thousand or more “disappearances” arising from the country’s tempestuous recent political past, but also because violence and funerary rituals have always marked the way of how the territory sees itself and how it processes conflicting historical memories. The initial point being not to forget about the past thus avoiding the exoticism of it. The second one is to remember that since the pre-Spanish/agricultural world, the cult of ancestral remembrance and the rituals of offering tributes to the dead have cut a deep furrow through the history of the country.

In the mournful history of Peru (a history that is reflected in Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s ‘The Followers’ - a wall of latent allegories and crossed aesthetic mutations) the exchanges, amalgamations and conflicts to both the pre-colonial and post-colonial languages of the mortuary are in abundance. The celebratory and dark aspects of Death, tribute/offering and memory, proceed and operate – formally and discursively- in the realm of an old agreement between pre-Hispanic and occidental traditions. Even today, in the modern arena of non-consensus between secularism and religion, said cult still flourishes.

To look back at the historical picture chronologically, it’s clear that for the pre-colonial peoples, the cult of the dead created a structure of communal and regional identification. Early collectives and groups shared the ritualistic idea of mentally cohabiting with the dead and their belongings, so that territory, religion and even agricultural production were made cohesive by it. Society united through the cult of death.

With the arrival of the Europeans came the attempt to secularise these practices. The European model introduced the cemetery and tried to impose a kind of tempered civil memory. The attempt to enforce a new type of identity and to push aside other forms of vernacular memory was carried out, but full conversion proved to be impossible. Confused and tired of simulating Catholic traditions, the indigenous people gradually reverted to their vernacular or hybrid practices. It is precisely in these forms (each time more complex in their mix) that Garrido-Lecca points out the dispersion of symbolism within the demise of a ‘unifying national identity’, using death as an image to express the ghosts of diverse local subjectivities of a country in open crisis.

Unlike the baroque vanitas - a subject previously used and questioned in Garrido-Lecca’s work - the popular cult of the dead in contemporary Peru does not have an expiry date, even less a moral judgment nor is it a simple sublimed celebration of the continuity of one life to another.

One has the impression that behind The Followers, behind this remake of the nichos of the Cuzco cemetery, there are yet more deaths and posthumous gestures than the miniaturised worlds spied through the windows of each tomb allow us to see. In that sense, the work operates almost as a transversal cut of other perspectives of the buried and unburied national subjectivities. Through these baroque arrangements (which also present a kind of kitsch domesticity), there is a suggestion that a disturbance exists in other aspects apart from death. It seems as if they portray the traumatic changes of the country and the search of a national identity.

Like the attempts to bury the national memories (the victims of political violence in the paupers graves, or the carnet photos scattered over the country, that remember the missing people…) the vernacular liturgies of Death in contemporary Peru are not a representation of the after life, but the empty remembrance of an expelled present. Its only way of redemption being the expression of memory as a ritual and permanent gesture, as a new space to recover: all allegorized yet quietly powerful.