Ximena Garrido-Lecca, "Botanical Insurgencies: Phascolus lunatus".

Botanical Insurgencies: Phascolus lunatus, by the Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca, is a work that is in the first exhibition of the project It's dark but I sing which opens the cycle of presentations by the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park.

Garrido-Lecca's work seeks in the natural graphics of seeds of the bean "phascolus lunatus" the attribution of a logic of ideograms with the objective of translating a chapter of the book Extirpation of the idolatry of Piru, of 1621, in which Father Pablo José Arriaga discusses cults of the Peruvian tradition to be eliminated in the colonization process. According to Garrido-Lecca, to the Bienal website, “the gesture of growing the beans represents a kind of symbolic re-activation of the supposed communication system of the Moche culture” which “uses the stains present in these beans as signs for an ideogrammatic writing.

His work works as a memory retrieval given that one of the Peruvian varieties of this plant was used by the pre-Incan Moche civilization in their written communication system (something recorded in the ceramics of this people). This same civilization developed an advanced irrigation system between the years 100 and 850, to which the work is also related to the elaboration of a hydroponic cultivation system that allows plants to grow throughout the year, offering the public the opportunity to accompany the different moments of the installation's transformation and giving longevity to the work, remembering that the Bienal itself will only be able to be seen in its entirety in September 2020.


Ximena Garrido-Lecca at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo
From February 8th to March 15th
Bienal Pavilion: Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, s/nr, gate 3, Ibirapuera Park
More information: (11) 5576-7600


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