Materia común [Common Ground]

Ximena Garrido-Lecca and Ishmael Randall Weeks.
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima (Mac). Lima, Peru
October 2019 – March 2020.
At the dawn of modernity, the Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella dreamed of a city so perfect that its design corresponded directly to the Copernican solar system, all its walls were to be covered with all the knowledge of its time, so that its inhabitants could access it whenever they wanted. He called this utopia The City of the Sun.
A few centuries later, and in the (very same) land of the sun, two of its best young artists, Ximena Garrido-Lecca (Lima, 1980) and Ishmael Randall Weeks (Cuzco, 1976) intend to cooperate between themselves to construct an ephemeral version of it, here and now, with the help of the public of this exhibition. As you hear this: whoever reads this is invited to roll up their shirt, put their feet in the mud and collaborate on the project.
In doing so, the active spectator will find that the mixture, with which the tapestries that will form this citadel are made of, are unique, since they are made of magical “black earth” from the town of Chilca (Cañete) and of local newspaper paper pulp. If in the original design the walls contained all the knowledge of their time, here we perceive the critical distance, forged in our era, between information and knowledge.