All the Remains
Time as a Field of Work
Lourdes de la Riva works with traces and materials traversed by time, bearers of accumulated memory. In All the Remains, this approach unfolds in a group of works, among them one that begins with abandoned painting frames found at the School of Fine Arts in Guatemala—wood eroded by years and by the action of moths.
Rather than restoring or discarding these vestiges, the artist subjects them to a meticulous dissection, cutting them into extremely thin slices, as if seeking to reveal the invisible layers of history they contain. From this process of dismemberment a new body emerges: a mural depicting the figure of an ouroboros, the dragon that devours and renews itself, an ancestral symbol of the circularity of time, of life that feeds on its own death.
In this operation there is a profound shift in meaning. The frame—an instrument that delimits, hierarchizes, and preserves painting—becomes painting itself. What once contained the image now is the image; what defined an inside and an outside turns into an intermediate matter, a porous boundary. De la Riva does not work with the gesture of preservation, but with that of transmutation. Her practice thus situates itself in a zone where deterioration ceases to be a threat and becomes language.
Moths, which in other contexts would be agents of destruction, appear here as invisible collaborators. Their biological action forms part of the artistic process, a kind of interspecies co-authorship that destabilizes the modern notion of the artist as a sovereign figure. In this sense, De la Riva’s work dialogues with Donna Haraway’s reflections on the need to “compose with” other species. Matter is alive, and its transformation—its erosion, its loss—is inseparable from its beauty.
In this project, the figure functions as a score: a sequence that does not fix a form but transforms it.
The mural thus presents itself as a material metaphor for artistic practice itself: a perpetual cycle of learning, wear, and rebirth. Like the ouroboros that devours itself to remain alive, art here does not seek to endure, but to transform.
This same principle extends to the rest of the works that make up the project. Old wooden folding screens, historically used as protection against the wind, are presented through the traces left by colonies of moths that perforated their lacquered surface. De la Riva extracts this eroded “skin” and transfers it onto sheets of Japanese paper, making cracks and voids visible as active spaces. These whites do not refer to absence, but to zones of suspension where history is interrupted and left open.
In the collages made from images taken from old books—ruined spaces already laden with memory—the artist incorporates fine papers altered by termites. The superimposition of both materials generates a new stratigraphy in which the printed image and the biological trace coexist without hierarchy. From this friction emerges an unstable narrative that does not seek to reconstruct a past, but to imagine it from its remains.
The wooden pieces and the prints derived from them function as records of these findings. As in an archaeological exercise, the artist exposes fragments, traces, and partial readings without aspiring to a definitive truth. Even the photographs evoking desert landscapes—constructed from the organic residue produced by moths—extend this logic to a broader scale, establishing associations with contemporary processes of environmental degradation, scarcity, and landscape transformation.
Taken as a whole, the project proposes sustained attention to that which usually remains at the margins: wear, residue, what has been inhabited by other organisms and other times. Far from closing a discourse, the works invite us to read matter as a living archive and to recognize in impermanence not a loss, but an active condition of meaning.
Bruno Leitão
2026