The review of the physical and the abstract that originate the objects themselves and the material from which they are made, was one of the premises with which Camilo Leyva developed the art project Machine. With pieces of wood found in the building, that years ago was used as a theater, the artist built several sculptures that make us recall different typologies of precarious machines. The sculptures are stationed at strategic locations throughout the building and, as connected presences, embody an invisible system full of fictions.
Assuming the character of an explorer, the artist considered the "dramatic" that was embedded in the materiality of the things that he had taken from the installation space. He examined the tensions between what was latent on, and what has vanished from those materials as constructed configurations or pieces-vestiges of a space. When Leyva made and dismantled (shaped), he reconstituted times and memories, re-mounted fragments of history of a "state of the world." There is without a doubt a latency of the process-related in Machine: an art project where the possibilities of the formal-visual language are expanded and in which there is evidence of a sculptural reflection in its contemporary sense.
Erika Martínez Cuervo Curator
This project was developed for Odeon art space that used to be a theatre. A series of wooden machines were made to create an interconnected system in the space. The visitor could participate and engaged with the sculptures by physical manipulation. Deus ex machina was a governing principle of the exhibition as it not only was a rhetoric figure used in greek theatre but a name for the machines that created the fictional spaces and movements on stage. So in the installation the rigging system was put forth, was naked. During the opening a group of actors were placed within the public and they were given an algorithmic script or set of instructions that helped them react to the multiple conversations they started with the visitors.