Ximena Garrido-Lecca: Reverse Engineering - Bonsack rolling machine, 2023 / Art Cologne 2023

At Art Cologne 2023, Galerie Gisela Capitain presented Ximena Garrido-Lecca's artwork “Reverse Engineering – Bonsack rolling machine”, a sculpture that the artist created for her exhibition at CAN Centre d'art Neuchâtel in 2023. “For the exhibition Reverse Engineering, Ximena Garrido-Lecca based herself on the first cigarette rolling machine whose invention in 1881 revolutionized the tobacco industry. She reproduced it exactly, piece by piece, from the patented plans. But instead of using the materials needed to make a functional model, she substituted them with a paste made of tobacco leaves and ashes, a ritual object with magical and purifying virtues called San Pedrito. The reference to reverse engineering is to be considered not only in its proper sense: the study of an object to understand its functioning and method of manufacture; but it also evokes the idea of a rewinding, a potential rewinding of history. Ximena Garrido-Lecca inverts the function of this machine, transforming it into an unproductive object and proposes to assign it another more mystical purpose; like a rotary press, which, instead of printing and spreading daily the news of the day, would swallow them every morning in order to reconsider their essence and transform them into salvific incantations”
(Text by CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel).

Ximena Garrido-Lecca was born in 1980 in Lima, Peru. Ximena Garrido-Lecca lives and works in Lima and Mexico City. Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s most recent solo exhibitions were held at CAN Centre d’art Neuchâtel in 2023, at Portikus, Frankfurt, the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, all in 2022. Her work is part of the fourth presentation at Boros Foundation, Berlin. In 2021 Ximena Garrido-Lecca took part in group presentations at Museo Madre, Naples, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the 34th Bienal de São Paulo. Further solo and group exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Bonn 2020, Projecto AMIL, Lima, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Lima, Orange County Museum of Art, OCMA Expand, Santa Ana, all 2019, SAPS, Mexico City, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, both 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit 2015, among many others.

P.S.: James Albert Bonsack (October 9, 1859 – June 1, 1924) was an American inventor. He developed an early cigarette rolling machine in 1880.