THROUGH WEAVING AND THREADS, CHIHARU SHIOTA AND XIMENA GARRIDO-LECCA CREATE A WORLD OF THEIR OWN IN PUERTO ESCONDIDO
Located in KM 113 of the federal highway that connects Salina Cruz to Pinotepa Nacional, a remote creative jewel stands. Architecture, design, and art cohabit along this section of the Oaxacan coast. A mix of boutique accommodations, gastronomy, and contemporary art proposals enrich Puerto Escondido’s endowment of inspiration and creation.
Founded in 2014 by internationally renowned artist Bosco Sodi, Casa Wabi hosts a variety of pavilions designed and brought up by international artists such as Izumi Kato, Huma Babha, and Richard Long, among others. They fill part of the 27 hectares that surround one of Tadao Ando´s masterpieces. A beautiful home that hosts periodic artistic residencies throughout the year, an annual exhibition, and clay and cinema programs.
Their most recent annual exhibition hosts an immersive installation by internationally renowned artist Chiharu Shiota. The World is Yours opened last February 1st in Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca.
Shiota’s immersive installations fulfill a dual role of creating a red-threaded unprecedented universe, but at the same time, they x-ray our shared present world. The threads symbolize relationships and connection, the strongest bonds that unite us, transcending our social, political, and cultural contexts.
Our existence connects us with others through thousands of emotional links, shared experiences, and common ground, which can be felt throughout the exhibition. As the artist states “While we all live different lives, art can bring us together to share the same space.”
The shared space Shiota created on the Oaxacan coast appears as a haven where time stops to reflect on what matters to us. Shiota’s installation is a safe place to dive into our inner world and discover the many ways in which we are connected.
“If you were president of the world, what would you change?” was the question posed to hundreds of kids from the neighboring towns; from El Zapote to Río Grande. As we navigate the red-thread sea we question what would be our answer. 5,000 sheets of bond paper replies and drawings extend upon us. Between “Abolishing homework” and “Today is Wednesday”, outputs that poke our inner child, we come across “Saving the whales” and “Eradicating violence” that ground us in the contemporary issues we share no matter our age.
Among the 135 km of red-thread sea, four disused fishing boats (pangas) stand, reminding us of the shared space in which we navigate this world. They also remind us of our sometimes-overlooked proximity—through the Pacific Ocean, the exhibition is just a shore away from Japan—and the possibilities of improving leadership and direction in our navigation.
Through disentangling the skein of threads, Shiota tightens the invisible weave that connects our existences.
While Shiota’s threads free common universal thoughts, a few meters away, we find woven threads that enlighten—literally—another Latin American reality.
A seven-minute walk from Casa Wabi, we found Meridiano, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2023 by Nicholas Olney, president of Kasmin Gallery, and Boris Vervoordt, director of Axel Vervoordt Gallery. Between the mountains and the sea, Axel Vervoordt and Tatsuro Miki conceived a meditative, minimal space that frames and dialogues with sculpture and installation throughout the year. The architectural design invites isolated fragments of light and air that infuse life into the space by changing its appearance from hour to hour and season.
On January 31st, the gallery opened an individual exhibition by Ximena Garrido-Lecca, a Peruvian artist whose interest in copper transcends the industrial characteristic of the material and reassigns it its lost ceremonial and sacred layer through traditional weaving techniques.
Garrido-Lecca’s practice confronts the forces of industrialization by contrasting them with traditional practices. The use of copper in Demarcaciones Inversas (Reverse Demarcations) creates a re-appropriation of the exploited material in a way that preserves cultural memory.
Violet hues appear when the sun touches the surface of Reallignments VIII. Through cut and woven copper tubes, typically used in gas piping, an iridescent panel appears upon us that although fragile looking, stands strong with its 80 kilograms weight. In the gallery’s courtyard, a free-standing copper-stick sculpture confronts us. Transmutations - Composition IV is a direct reference to structures used as a means of protest against the displacement on the outskirts of Lima. Her work denounces an extractivist economy in a very subtle way.
Facing the copper sticks, Reallignments VI+VII frame the space’s main room with the reflections the sun sheds upon them. These two woven panels abstract the functional quality of copper -for which it is exploited- and present a rather ritual structure that serves no purpose but ornament.
Casa Wabi, and Meridiano, have been creating a world of its own in the wild and paradisiac area that frames a string of the Pacific Ocean.
Chiharu Shiota’s The World Is Yours is on view until January 2026 and Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s Demarcaciones Inversas (Reverse Demarcations) until June 2025.
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