Co-published with Ediciones Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile
Language: English / Spanish
Size: 17 x 23 cm
Pages: 252
Binding: Thread sewn
Color and Black and White
Format: Softcover
1st ed: October 12th 2024, 10:22 am
Run: 300 copies
Edited by Carolina Castro Jorquera & Alejandro Leonhardt
Designed by Otros Pérez
ISBN: 978-84-09-52323-8

 

Co-published with Ediciones Universidad Finis Terrae (Chile), the book “Hagas Lo Que Hagas Toma Tiempo Hacer Nada” (Whatever You Do It Takes Time to Do Nothing), co-edited by Carolina Castro Jorquera and Alejandro Leonhardt, takes us through an artistic and reflective journey where four fundamental concepts of Leonhardt’s practice—Taking, Time, Making, and Nothing—intertwine with an exploration of the everyday and the poetics of the useless.

Structured as a “choral film,” the book entrusts each of these concepts to curators, writers, and artists who, from their own perspectives, develop essays that dissect the essential actions and gestures within the author’s practice. Their texts dialogue with photographs of Leonhardt’s works, which present a chronological journey through sculptural interventions, assemblages, and creative processes.

Alejandro Leonhardt, faithful to his critical gaze on waste and the value of the discarded, manages to reformulate found objects and endow them with new narratives. Whether guiding us through installations that reuse the debris of contemporary life or inviting us to rethink the gestures of the everyday, the work is not solely about re-signifying materials. Rather, it proposes an active reflection on human relationships with their environment and the possibilities of the unproductive as resistance to the utilitarian paradigm.

Among the notable texts, we find Francesco Giaveri’s exploration of the concept of “taking,” framing Leonhardt’s practice of collection as an almost archaeological and poetic method. Àngels Miralda, for her part, reminds us of the intrinsic connection between objects and time, linking material memory with planetary rhythms. Similarly, Ian Waelder describes, with insight and humor, Leonhardt’s act of making as a “dance with the absurd,” while Cristián Silva addresses “nothing” from its expressive and existential possibilities.

Taken as a whole, this book-object not only offers us an interdisciplinary analysis of Leonhardt’s artistic practice,

but also celebrates the cracks and absences in objects and in contemporary life. Hagas lo que hagas, toma tiempo hacer nada becomes a radical proposal for contemplation that is as reflective as it is aesthetic. A manual on the poetics of residue, time, and the limits of creation.

Text by Ediciones Universidad Finis Terrae.