Leyla Cárdenas installation, sculpture, mixed-media work delves into urban ruins and cities landscapes as indications of social transformation, loss and historical memory.
Over the last years she has developed a series of sculptural works that seek to investigate the layers that constitute and construct things and places. Relating directly to the physicality of the space as a point of departure. Using found objects and places that accumulate layers of information, containing what is particular from a place. The superficial skin becomes a profound path to explore and discover in each step the intersection of different experiences of time. (the historic time, material time, the time of everyday, and perhaps a more existential/ psychological time that has to do with the duration of the experience.) Hence, her approach has been to work out from the process of scrutinizing within the remnants of apparently empty spaces. Considering the recovered fragments as documents/witnesses of inhabitation and memories that standstill among loss.
The gesture is sculptural but without making sculpted objects; using destruction as a way of construction, allowing an engagement to a particular place and all the confluences and dimensions within.
Lyon Bienial 2022
Inspired by the abandoned building Musée Guimet, the Natural History Museum of Lyon, Leyla Cardenas proposed two works: Removed and Self-contained Withstander.
"Removed" is a site-specific intervention in which the building and the drawing have a ghost like presence, a presence that is seen as absence—which defines the nature and experience of a trace. The drawing of a building on a white wall has been meticulously removed until the floor was covered with layers of paint.
"Self-contained Withstander" reflects on what is really holding us and the spaces together. There is a layer of the fabric of reality that is elusive and fragile but ever present. The Musée Guimet could be seen as abandoned, a thing of the past, but it's our contemporary. Architecture transforms and changes with us and our temporalities but gives us the impression of everlasting solidity. It's an art form of transformation and not of permanence. The piece is also an example of profound dialogue and exploration of the spaces where the artist works, integrating a column in the room in the piece.