Reynier Leyva Novo: Algo deja quien se va

The official history’s narratives are sustained by symbols and institutions that operate in the public space in a framework of, at least, ambivalent visibility. Monuments and state institutions are as intertwined with the devices of control as the laws and norms, acting as a “transmission belt” between the past and the present, between power and the communities living in a city or a state. However, something always remains in a blind spot, unattended. Trajectories of political imagination that do not always respond to the same regimes of visuality but underlie other perceptible layers. This distance between the living conditions of the present and the glorification of the past, often presented as untouchable by the hegemonic powers, is revealed as a space for artistic research from which alternatives to the official narrative emerge.

Algo deja quien se va is Reynier Leyva Novo’s first solo exhibition in Spain. In it, he traces the history of memory and the state policies around it, seeking its manifestation and resurgence forms. The artist presents two series in which he continues some of his most recent research, adapted and created for this specific exhibition in and for the Spanish context. They link, on the one hand, the colonial history of Cuba and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines with its reflection in the public space of the former metropolis and, on the other, the configuration of the state with the volatile nature of its institutions.

First, it is the Global Active Dust Collection Center, previously produced in Washington DC and expanded for this occasion with institutional buildings and monuments located in Madrid that define, from different perspectives, the contemporary state. As we approach this re-collection of seemingly abstract images, we will see vibrant landscapes resulting from the collection of dust and other debris from the walls, floors, and sidewalks adjacent to the case studies. An unusual, barely human perspective, which departs from the usual, solemn image of these institutions and monuments, with the presence of tiny microorganisms destined to be invisible or literally “swept away,” is now presented as the main characters of the political sphere. This discrepancy contrasts with the discourses on the permanence of institutions and proposes a twist: the creation of an archive of what we do not notice but what is happening around us. It, then, places institutions in the rank of the ephemeral but also in that of random since no state is susceptible to the passage of time and its transformations. Thus, the pretended solidity of power moves from the rank of the permanent to that which is destined to disappear. The selection of these spaces is related to what defines a state and national identity based on a series of often contested but generally assimilated discourses. In the case of Madrid, the ministries and institutions that have a more profound impact on the norms that govern life within the framework of liberal citizenship intersect with spaces that embody the discourses on knowledge and history in Spain, such as the Biblioteca Nacional or the monument El Abrazo, dedicated to the memory of the transition to democracy in Spain, among others.

Secondly, he presents El susurro de Mnemosine, a continuation of a series applied to the colonial memory of Cuba and its independence, connecting it with the Spanish intervention and the importance of the United States in that process. It also approaches, although, to a lesser extent, another territory then called “overseas”: the Philippines, inseparable from Cuba in some stories around 1898. In this series, a catalog of monuments in honor of the “heroes” of both colonial wars, thus understood from the Spanish perspective, is veiled by layers of paint of a cold chromatic range and later re-veiled using infrared reflectography techniques from conservation and art restoration fields. This raises a conceptual expression of how the mechanisms of memory work, both from a collective perspective and from the standpoint of state policies. The story that emerges is that of a systematic forgetting of colonial history in Spain that, paradoxically, does not leave the public space; as if those supposed heroes, obdurate, were waiting to be seen, remembered, when someone comes looking for them, also raising the imbalance between the memory of the independence wars and their oblivion in Spain.

While the State is configured around institutions of colonial origin and logic, the symbolic figures that resist their obsolescence resound like whispers, a constant but low-intensity sound that progressively affects the bodies with which they cross in streets and public spaces.

Text and curatorship by Inés Plasencia Camps. With the collaboration of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.