Memorias del Colapso: Miguel Cardenas Meira

Memories of the collapse: Abysses in the Fold of Time.

We breathe in the present—there is no other moment.

One shore of time recedes, blurred and distant; the other has yet to take shape on the horizon. Despite this certainty, this timeless and persistent mantra, we inhabit the now while negotiating between origin and destiny; beings with historical consciousness on the verge of being cast into an archaeological futurism.

Welcome to Memories of Collapse, the exhibition by Miguel Cárdenas (Bogotá, 1973) that opens a threshold between what is known—as we leave it behind—and what has not yet arrived with its uncertain outcomes. Once across the portal, we traverse possible pasts and probable futures that conjure the idea of a world already collapsed, of the post-cataclysm as both pictorial and sculptural scenario, but also of the hope implicitly embedded in this tradition: that of the apocalyptic catastrophe as a powerful imaginary of the West. There is no condemnation without redemption.

Memories of Collapse invokes landscapes, settings, and characters that animate and inhabit artistic planes open to many others, reiterating the notion of mise en abyme, charting paths among interconnected universes. Far from plunging us into the darkness of a fatalistic horror, this exhibition weaves together pictorial tradition, imaginary archaeology, and fantastic verism, offering multiple possibilities for wandering through the folds of time in the key of a plastic fiction.

Caridad Botella