XIMENA GARRIDO LECCA AT MIMA CURATED BY PLB AND A TOUR OF THE MONUMENTS OF MIDDLESBROUGH

Ximena Garrido-Lecca
Sonido Laser (Laser Sound), 2012
fake adobe brick wall and paint
Sonido Laser is an ongoing continuation of Garrido-Lecca’s 'Walls of Progress' series, an investigation into the visual imagery found in adobe brick walls in the highlands of Peru. Such walls are used as canvases exhibiting hand painted murals including social propaganda and concerts, political slogans and government party promises, or the advertising of consumer products. Most of them use low-tech design and striking fonts and colours. Each season the walls are repainted according with the political or musical developments of the moment in the country. For Garrido-Lecca the collision between the historical method of building and the images they portray present the reality of these rural areas, and the confrontation between tradition and the progress promised by regional politics and the desire of modernity accessed through tecno regional sounds. The sound coming from the installation is the recording of a street party, playing technohuayno, an emerging genre of music from the Andes. Two different tracks are played at the same time, one through each speaker, creating in conjunction a disorientating sound.







Ximena Garrido-Lecca
Composition II, 2012
Raffia sacking
Made of sacks found on traditional market of Peru, in which the raffia bags are used in the display of goods and as curtains dividing inside and outside. The different names of the products originally sold in the bags (rice, flour etc.) make evident the tensions still existing today between an idealised Inca past and goods of Spanish or Chinese origin.


Ximena Garrido-Lecca
Toropukllay, 2012
HD video, 3 min 12 second loop
Music by Celso Garrido Lecca
Toropukllay documents the annual traditional celebration of the same name which takes place around the date of Peru’s Independence Day in the villages of the highlands of Peru. The film shows a power struggle between a huge condor and a bull. The ‘blood festival’  involves the condor being sewn to the bull, both animals trying to free from each other while the bull charges around the village square. Garrido-Lecca uses this imagery to represent the centuries of struggle between the indigenous and the colonial, the traditional and the modern. 


Mima's building with a giant bottle by Claes Oldenburg next to it
http://www.visitmima.com/

Ximena Garrido-Lecca at MIMA
curated by Pablo León de la Barra

Ximena Garrido-Lecca was born in Lima, in 1980 and she has lived and worked in London since 2001. She completed an MA Fine Arts (2004) and a Post-Graduate Diploma (2002) at Byam Shaw School of Art, as well as a BA at Universidad Catolica del Peru. Her work has been shown in Peru, Germany and the United Kingdom.
http://www.ximenagarridolecca.com/


Ximena Garrido-Lecca's exhibition is supported by Arts Council England and Mima.
Garrido-Lecca’s work is shown at Mima as part of ¡VAMOS! Festival. The festival runs from the 1 June to 15 July 2012, and celebrates Spanish and Portuguese speaking cultures in Newcastle and the north east of England. ¡VAMOS! combines cuisine, art, film, theatre, dance, music, literature, fashion, sport and education.
www.vamosfestival.com

and a tour of the monuments of Middlesbrough:

map of Middlesbrough at the train station


fruit sellers in the highstreet


abandoned and boarded early modernism


not regenerated remains of a neighbourhood which looks like a ghost town




new Wizard of Oz buildings by FAT in the not yet regenerated landscape



the Middlesbrough College, called by locals the tin foil building


Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge in the background


Anish Kapoor & Cecil Balmond's giant sculpture which responds to the name Temenos



remains of Boro's industrial landscape in the background


Kapoor's sculpture symbolically joining the industrial past with the future regeneration...