“Confusions of contemporaneity reveal the precipitate and speculative nature of photological knowledge.” — Dan Hicks, 2020

The pure, pristine, uncontaminated landscape does not truly exist. The moment we begin to observe, a transformation is already taking place, through the materialization of the gaze in space. Yet space is not simply a place we see in the photographic present, nor a container with a fixed form; it is always irregular—it contracts and expands, it dissolves. When we are in the presence of the vestige, what we see is not the allegorical effect of ruin, but an artifact of time. In des tramo, by Leyla Cárdenas, the unweaving of historical images becomes a form of photological knowledge that reveals, according to archaeologist Dan Hicks, “a landscape composed of different places, which only become visible after an interval of time.” The photological is a visual mode in which photography is neither a fixed image nor a trace or imprint, but rather a continuous sensory effect, still in progress. But what exactly do we see after this process of sublimation, through which ink and fabric become indistinguishable from one another at the molecular level? The final result is a memory of places, an archive of dislocation, in time and space.

The Steamship Simón Bolívar on the Magdalena is one of several engravings published in 1869 in the volume The Fabulous Geography of Colombia by the French botanist Charles Saffray, an account by a European traveler of his journeys through New Granada in the nineteenth century. These images serve as the point of departure for Cárdenas’s unweaving, which makes us aware of the ideology of the colonial landscape—but not in the traditional sense. The artist exposes the European effort to recreate a flat landscape, as a grid for interpretation and exploitation, thereby freezing time. The landscape, however, is not an inert and endless matter, but an interface of interaction between human intervention and nature. des tramo reveals an asymmetric topography in which geological features, environmental violence, traces of human occupation, and territory form complex assemblages that are not simply stacked in layers; it is durational time, in constant transformation.

Leyla Cárdenas unweaves images in two distinct directions: the vertical warp held on the loom, like an arrow of time, and the horizontal weft, stretched across the warp, as the figure of space. But how do we know that space descends and that time moves forward and backward? In fact, we do not. Yet the fragile and unstable threads cause the composition to vibrate, striate, and dissolve, until only the photological aspect remains, which, as Hicks elaborates, “projects light, reveals the landscape, constructs memory, generates self-knowledge, and discloses appearance.” At this moment of reflection, the phenomenon of the change in the direction of light’s trajectory gives rise to the vestige—not as a consequence of dissolution, but as raw material. What Cristián Simonetti calls “feeling the past forward” becomes a lived experience in this fleeting moment of confusion in which contemporaneities collide, shimmering like the Magdalena River on a cool morning in 1861, when its silky surface concealed many latent dangers.

And the surface continues to be a site of fundamental operations for Cárdenas: separating the images of des tramo into warp and weft, which contain time and space as vectors, alludes to the two-dimensional axes of photographic composition, yet a third axis of depth and movement is already embedded in perception. As the artist states, “when you remove the first layer of space, there is already great depth.” It is precisely this depth that prevents the vestige, memory, and the photological from disintegrating into vectors. However, at the moment when depth materializes, in the contours of light, the grid of Cartesian space has already disappeared; we are submerged up to our ankles in the viscous, indeterminate, and corrosive substance of time. This time of memory has neither beginning nor end; it is speculative, durational, and transformative. But how long does time last? Archaeology has posed this question for two centuries. The landscape responds with certainty: time is a fiction of linear measurement.

Arie Amaya-Akkermans

Opening date: September 12, 2024

Closing date: November 9, 2024