Exhibition I Solo show

Edith Dekyndt

23 June – 28 July 2024
Can Garita, Ibiza, Spain

Photography by Maria Santos and Valentine Riccardi

Can Garita & Los Enamorados are pleased to present Edith Dekyndt’s first solo show in Spain. On this occasion, the show features a new selection of sculptures and video especially made for this exhibition which coincide with CAN Art.

During her stay in Ibiza in 2023, Edith Dekyndt became interested in the fact that the island has been invaded for twenty years by snakes imported in the form of eggs in the hundred-year-old trees from the mainland. This progressive invasion destroys the endemic fauna and more particularly the lizards which have been essential to the subtle environmental balance of the island for millennia.

The project was to harvest and process the skins of snakes captured by the inhabitants of the island. Then they were sewn together, gradually forming a flag, that she filmed in 2024 in the sky of the place called Puerta Del Cielo (Heaven’s Gate).

Edith Dekyndt’s work revolves around matter, which she explores down to the infinitely small. She is influenced by different thinkers who have participated in their positions in the materialist tradition, from the animism of Spinoza to the vitalism of Deleuze and Guattari, up to Jane Bennett who has considered this question of this “vague essence” of matter. What Jane Bennett notices is that Deleuze and Guattari, by insisting on the mobile and slow materiality of objects, highlighted their historicity, their evolution over time and in a reconfiguration of their relationship to other things, in a continuous production of arrangement. But as Benett points out, while it is easy to recognize the composition of various material parts, it is more difficult to conceive of these materials as living and self-organizing rather than passive mechanics, under the direction of something immaterial, like an active soul or spirit.