No Vacancy: Luján Candria, Living Archive

Living Archive is a site-specific installation of suspended, translucent photo-based textiles featuring fragmented images of native South Florida vegetation. These layered images evoke living memory—traces of landscapes that predate the city’s rapid urban development and continue to quietly shape its identity. Through layering, enlargement and subtle interventions, the photographic imagery shifts between presence and disappearance, evoking a landscape in continuous transition. Native plants emerge as living archives, carrying traces of migration, adaptation and environmental change. Their presence invites an earlier landscape to momentarily re-enter the built environment, creating a quiet encounter between memory, nature and architecture. The work asks us to consider what persists as a city changes and how the landscapes that came before remain part of the places we inhabit. Luján Candria is a Miami-based artist working across photography, textiles, video, sound and installation. Her work includes suspended photographic textiles and immersive installations that explore how memory fragments and changes, connecting perception with the natural world. She graduated in Sculpture from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes in Buenos Aires and holds an Associate Degree from the Escuela Nacional de Cerámica. Her work has been exhibited at galleries, institutions, art fairs and festivals across Latin America, Europe, Asia and the United States. Most recently, she presented Still More Fragile, an immersive solo exhibition at Faena Art Project Room (2026). Candria’s honors include The Ellies Creator Award (2025, 2026), the Artist Access Grant from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and FUNDarte and the Miami Individual Artists Grant. Additional recognitions include the MAS! Artist Grant, the Oolite Arts Relief Fund and the Locust Projects–Andy Warhol Foundation Miami Artist Relief Fund Grant (2020). She also received the ArtReview Prize, which led to a residency at Casa Wabi in 2019. Candria was an artist-in-residence at Oolite Arts and is currently in residence at Bakehouse Art Complex.