solo show at Casas Riegner 2024

“Confusions of contemporaneities reveal the untimely and speculative nature of

photological knowledge.” –Dan Hicks, 2020

The pure, pristine, uncontaminated landscape does not really exist. As soon as we begin looking, a transformation is already taking place through the embodiment of the gaze in space. But the space isn’t simply the place we see in the photographic present, or a container with a definite shape; it is always irregular, shrinking and expanding, dissolving.
The presence of the trace is not the allegorical effect of ruins, but the artifact of time itself. In Leyla Cárdenas’ ‘Un-Woven’, the unweaving of historical images is a form of photological knowledge that reveals, according to archaeologist Dan Hicks, “a landscape that is made up of places, made visible only after an interval of time”. The photological is a visual mode in which the photograph is neither a still-image, nor a remnant or trace, but an unfinished, still ongoing, sensorial effect. But what exactly do we see after this process of sublimation, through which the ink and the fabric become indistinguishable from each other at the molecular level? The final result is a memory of places. An archive of dislocation, across both time and space. [pdf FULL TEXT by Arie Akkerman]