Algo deja quien se va 

Reynier Leyva Novo

The narratives about the official story are held by symbols and institutions that operate in the public space in a framework of visibility, to say the least, ambivalent. So intertwined with the control devices such as the own laws and rules that dictate which are the monuments and the state institutions, which act as a transmission belt between the past and the present, between the power and the communities that they live in a city or a state. However, something is always in a blind spot, without surveillance, because it's always something left who is going. Trajectories of political imagination that does not always respond to the same regimes of visuality, but underlying layers of the perceptible. This distance between the conditions of life of the present and the glorification of the past, which is often presented as untouchable from the hegemonic powers, is revealed as a space of artistic research of the emerging alternatives to the account officer.  

Algo deja quien se va it is the first solo exhibition in Spain of Reynier Leyva Novo, and in her retrace the becomings of the memory, and state policies on this in search of its forms of manifestation and rebirth. The artist presents here two series, which continues some of his most recent research, adapted and created for this exhibition, specifically in and to the Spanish context. Linked, 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 ancient metropolis, and, on the other, the configuration of the state with the volatile of their institutions.  

In the first place, Dust of State (Global Active Dust Collection Center)previously produced in Washington, DC and expanded for this occasion with institutional buildings and monuments located in Madrid, spain defined from various perspectives, the state of the contemporary. If we approach this re-collection of images seemingly abstract we will see a sort of scenery, vibrant, resulting from the collection of dust and other debris of the walls, floors and sidewalks surrounding the cases of study. A perspective unusual, just human, that is far from the usual image, solemn, of these institutions, and monuments, with the presence of small micro-organisms intended to be invisible, or literally “sweeps”, now presented as the main characters in the political sphere. This opposition contrasts with the discourses about the permanence of the institutions and proposes a twist: the creation of a file of what we do not repair but that happens around. Placed as well as the institutions within the range of the ephemeral, but also in that of the random, since there is no state which is not susceptible to the passage of time and its transformations. Thus, the supposed strength of the power is shifted from the range of standing up to what is destined to disappear. The selection of these spaces has to do with what defines a state and national identity on the basis of a series of speeches often contested, but generally assimilated. In the case of the city of Madrid, the ministries and institutions involved more deeply in the rules governing the life in the framework of the liberal citizenry cross paths with spaces that embody discourses on the knowledge and history in Spain, as are the cases of the National Library or the monument The Embracededicated to the memory of the Transition to democracy in Spain, among others.  

In the second place, El susurro de Mnemosine, also a continuation of a series applied to the memory colonial Cuba and its independence, connecting it both with the Spanish intervention as the importance of the united States in that process. It is also about, although to a lesser extent, to other territory, then called “overseas” as was the Philippines, inseparable from Cuba in certain narratives around 1898. In this series, a catalogue of monuments in honor of the “heroes” of the two colonial wars, understood as well from the perspective of Spanish, are veiled by layers of paint in a color palette cold, and later re-viewed by using techniques of reflectografia infrared, used in the field of conservation and restoration of art. This raises an expression of nature concept on how to operate the mechanisms of memory, both from the perspective of the collective, as well as from state policies. The story that emerges is that of a systematic forgetting of the colonial history in Spain, which, paradoxically, does not leave, however, the public space. As if those so-called heroes, blinded, wait to be seen, remembered, when someone go to look for them, considering also the imbalance between the memory of the wars of independence, and his forgetfulness in Spain.  

While the State is configured on the basis of institutions of origin and colonial logic, the symbolic figures that resist obsolescence resonate as a whisper, a constant sound, but of low intensity, which affects progressively bodies with the intersecting streets and public spaces.  

– Inés Plasencia Camps