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To the east lie the Monserrate and Guadalupe mountains; to the west, the Bogotá River; and in between, the sprawling capital of Colombia: Bogotá. Sitting on a plateau nestled in the high Andes at an elevation of more than 8,500 feet, the city was initially named Bacatá by the Muisca people, the Indigenous inhabitants of central Colombia.
The Muisca depended on their close connection to the city’s montane savanna ecosystem—a type of wetland found in mountain areas—that has since been largely drained and dried due to Spanish colonization and subsequent urbanization.
In contrast to Colombia’s consistent ranking as the second most biodiverse country in the world, its history has been marked by Spanish imperialism, human enslavement, and more than five decades of civil war. Against this backdrop, multimedia artist Leyla Cárdenas (b. 1975, Bogotá) excavates layers of architectural ruins, investigating the histories of these sites through installations that function as sculptures and films.
Growing up “in a city that was rundown, abandoned, a little bit broken; a society that was hurt, trying to weave itself back,” exploring Bogotá, its history, and revealing its stories have always been in the back of Cárdenas’s mind.
Engaging with discarded and extracted objects—fragments of what once was—the artist looks into historical memory and amnesia, as well as social and urban transformation, hoping to uncover a path that will allow her to heal her broken relationship with her home and heritage. These ruins often appear in Cárdenas’s pieces as photographs printed onto stretched, frayed, and deconstructed textiles or as partial reconstructions as an act of restoration.
After receiving her B.A. in Fine Arts from Universidad de Los Andes, the artist left for the United States, where she obtained her M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following the completion of her Master’s degree, Cárdenas returned to her home city, eventually creating Excision, an installation pivotal in defining her ongoing career.
While exploring the historic center of Bogotá, she stumbled upon an 1880s house built during the Colombian Republican Period that was slated to be razed. Interested in capturing the often unseen consequences of destruction for redevelopment and urban renewal within the city, the artist extracted pieces of the house’s walls, ceilings, floors, and furniture, rendering the building an archive of the country’s attempts at reconstruction and modernization.
With these remnants, in 2012, Cárdenas produced Excision, a sculpture measuring nearly 15 feet wide and ten-and-a-half feet tall, comprising a partial replica of a segment of the house, which stands as a testament to the importance and need to preserve a historical urban narrative. Cárdenas’s research launched her into what she calls “an obsession” with the 19th century and also led her to investigate the Río Magdalena (Magdalena River).
The Río Magdalena is Colombia’s main river, stretching from the Andes in the south-central region of the country to the Caribbean Sea along a northward path. Until the 1960s, steamboats often traveled up and down the river, transporting people and goods. The river basin provides drinking water for more than 35 million people and accounts for 70 percent of Colombia’s hydroelectric energy and 90 percent of its thermo-electric power. The river basin is also richly biodiverse, with numerous species of fish, mammals, birds, plants, and reptiles.
Sitting at a coffee shop on a beautiful September morning in the Chapinero district of her home city, Cárdenas discussed the findings from researching her beloved river. With excitement and emphasis, the artist tells me, “We are a people of water…Bogotá was a city of rivers, and the Muisca that used to live here ate crab and fish as their main diet because of all this water… We were water.”
Cárdenas aims to highlight the city’s connection to water in her most recent show, des tramo (un woven), at Casas Riegner.
Within French botanist Charles Saffray’s 1869 book Fabulous Colombia’s Geography, the artists happened upon an engraving titled “The Simon Bolívar Steamship on the Magdalena River,” that was fundamental, among others in the volume, in initiating the show. Cárdenas transferred and printed the images onto textiles and began unweaving the warp and the weft. Using a dye-sublimation method, the artist allows the image to seep into the threads, creating a three-dimensional sculpture from which, Cárdenas states, “the image resists to leave.”
El pasado hacia adelante (The past towards the future), an installation hanging from a brass rod, shows an image of the Bogotá River—photographed by Cárdenas—that has been dye-sublimated onto a textile. Unwoven from the bottom, the tapestry exposes most of its threads except for a segment at the top. Despite its unraveling, the image remains coherent.
Projecting from the center of the hanging image of the Bogotá River is another piece displaying one of the engravings from Fabulous Colombia’s Geography. The Simon Bolívar steamship is shown to be unable to cross the Magdalena River due to human-made contamination and exposed rocks. By unweaving the textiles, the artist tries to convey the idea of digging below the surface and examining beyond what initially meets the eye.
Metaphorically and literally, digging is a fundamental part of Cárdenas’s focus on reframing and repositioning archeological fragments, the stories they hold, and how they can inform the present. “I believe more in archaeology than history because archaeology was what it was,” she says. “I think we are all archaeologists, in a way; we keep finding things, collecting them, organizing them, making sense of the fragments or how to make what was invisible, visible…”
Cárdenas’s solo show, des tramo continues in Bogotà through November 9. Find more information on the artist’s website and Instagram.
Header image: Detail of Desfase_Maastrich, 2024. Dye-sublimated textile partially un-weaved, mud, and bronze, 218 x 137 centimeters. All images courtesy of the artist and Casas Riegner. Photos by Niko Jacob.