artnexus #125

Throughout her extensive body of work, Ximena Garrido-Lecca (Lima, Peru, 1980) has explored a range of themes that examine the historical traces of Andean culture in relation to Peru’s modernization processes. She employs sculptural, installation, and audiovisual media to reflect on how knowledge and practices rooted in long-standing Andean traditions are connected to the ways contemporary industries operate.

Garrido-Lecca has also revealed a sustained interest in both urban and rural architecture, as well as the landscapes that encompass them. This is reflected in her references to popular designs from her surroundings, which she appropriates in her sculptural work to examine how industry exploits materials without regard for what this means for our relationship with nature. Underlying her work is a particularly significant line of inquiry: does modernity mean that nature’s fate is to be treated solely as a resource?

Her engagement with copper also forms a cornerstone of her artistic reflections. This focus underpins her advocacy for ancestral techniques, which offer potent means to resist a modernity that seeks to make everything homogenous.

Given copper’s significant role in the Peruvian economy—copper wire being one of its main industries and typically exported as a raw material—Garrido-Lecca sees this as a form of forgetting the popular traditions associated with its local use. In works such as Realignments I+II (2018)—featured on our cover page—which stem from research in a copper mine, the artist uncovers the traditions surrounding this material and explores how and why certain artisanal techniques persist. Through her artwork, Garrido-Lecca reveals a memory that, despite industrialization, has not been lost. Her practice shows us that certain physical and temporal spaces, seemingly far apart—such as craft and industry—can, in fact, allow us to connect past and present.

IVONNE PINI