XIMENA GARRIDO-LECCA:DEMARCACIONES INVERSAS
(REVERSE DEMARCATIONS)

Meridiano announces an exhibition of new work by Lima-born, Mexico City-based artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca (b. 1980). In Demarcaciones Inversas (Reverse Demarcations), Garrido-Lecca explores the contrast between ancestral practices, such as weaving, and the forces of modern industrialization. This exhibition is the fourth in Meridiano’s program, following installations by Joel Shapiro, Gabriel Chaile, and Kimsooja. Founded in 2023 by Kasmin President Nicholas Olney and Boris Vervoordt, Director of Axel Vervoordt Co., Meridiano is situated on the Oaxacan coast in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. The gallery provides a platform for long-form, site-specific, and experimental exhibitions by artists working internationally and across disciplines.

Inside Meridiano, new wall-based works from the artist's Aleaciones con memoria de forma (Shape Memory Alloys) series (2013–ongoing) will be on view. Garrido-Lecca realizes these works by transforming industrialized copper into artisanal handwoven textiles. In so doing, she reimagines the material within the cultural manifestations of earlier times, often associated with the sun and fire in pre-Columbian cultures, and divorces it from its contemporary uses as an electrical conductor or for gas piping.

The distinct qualities of artisanal weaves instead collide with the industrial character of the copper. Garrido-Lecca further probes the material’s physical properties—its conductivity and malleability—in the series title. Referencing the ability of certain metals to return to their original shape under specific conditions, Garrido-Lecca poetically describes her process of reversing the evolution of the material, from its industrial form to its cultural origins. Garrido-Lecca began this series in 2013 following her time spent in the highlands’ copper mining city of Cerro de Pasco.

In the gallery’s courtyard, Garrido-Lecca presents a freestanding cast-copper sculpture from her Transmutaciones (Transmutations) series (2018–ongoing), inspired by the wooden structures that migrants have used to mark land on the outskirts of Lima since the 1950s. These resemble enlarged poles leaning against one another, rising vertically from the floor. In the coastal desert of Peru, wooden structures are often linked with bamboo panels, gradually growing and assuming more permanent states in brick and concrete. The installation resonates as a human intervention within the minimalist, temple-like structure of Meridiano, generating a palpable anachronism. The oculus in the main space projects sunlight onto the copper weavings, while the poles cast shadows on the surrounding walls, marking the passage of time.

Across Peru, raw copper is extracted and exported before re-imported in its processed form, fueling a transnational economic model detrimental to local communities and the natural landscape. Garrido-Lecca’s work is informed by that of the late Peruvian anthropologist José Matos Mar, whose influential writing in the 1980s outlined the emergence of an informal economy in Lima caused by the political decline of Andean farming communities. According to Matos Mar, modernization in Peru effectively centralized economic and political power in the capital, leading to new migration patterns toward Lima and popular demands for housing, land, and basic services. In Demarcaciones Inversas, Garrido-Lecca transforms an exploited material, copper, into one used for land possession.