State of Transition—Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova

Dimensions Variable (DV) presents a solo project titled State of Transition by Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova. The exhibition opens on June 10, 2026, and runs through August 21, 2026.

State of Transition grows from Rodríguez-Casanova’s sustained investigation into the material systems that shape daily life at the margins—the gates, construction materials, mass-produced domestic objects, and industrial hardware that populate the spaces of the working class and the displaced. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1973, Rodríguez-Casanova immigrated to the U.S. as a child during the Mariel boatlift, crossing the Straits of Florida as part of one of the largest and most perilous mass migrations in Cuban history. That experience—of threshold, of departure, of a life bundled up and carried toward an uncertain shore—is the biographical and emotional foundation of his practice, and it connects his story to the millions of people who continue to risk their lives across the world’s most dangerous migration routes: the Sonoran Desert, the Mediterranean Sea, the Darién Gap, the rivers of the Texas borderlands, and the ninety miles of open water between Cuba and South Florida.

At the center of the exhibition is a question about the fine and often invisible line between restraint and protection—between the act of being held in place and the act of holding things together. As Gaston Bachelard argued in The Poetics of Space, inhabited space carries within it the very essence of home.¹ But what happens to that idea when home is not a place of dwelling but a place of departure and transition? When do the objects of everyday life become the things you gather and carry toward an uncertain horizon? Rodríguez-Casanova’s practice has long explored these questions through the material logic of everyday objects—what Arjun Appadurai identified as the “social life of things,” the capacity of objects to accumulate meaning as they move across different contexts, economies, and hands.² Here, those same objects are pressed into new urgency as the material vocabulary of migration and escape.

The research grounding State of Transition draws on the work of anthropologist Jason De León, whose Undocumented Migration Project has cataloged nearly 10,000 objects left by migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.³ De León’s fieldwork documents not only the ordinary evidence of crossing—discarded shoes, water bottles, torn clothing—but also the intentional traces left by people who knew they were risking their lives: rosaries hung from the branches of desert trees, prayer cards tucked into rock crevices, makeshift shrines stocked with crucifixes and images of Santo Toribio Romo, the saint believed to watch over migrants.⁴ These acts of trace-making—the need to say I was here, I was trying—speak to an impulse that runs across every migration route in the world.⁵ They have been shaped, in no small part, by deliberate policy: the U.S. enforcement strategy known as Prevention through Deterrence systematically funneled migrants into remote and lethal terrain, producing a recorded death toll in Arizona alone that has exceeded 4,400 since 2000.⁶

State of Transition takes its conceptual bearings from Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space”—the liminal zone between cultures and histories where fixed identities come undone and new ones are only beginning to form.⁷ The work of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo offers an important precedent: her practice, driven by what she describes as “the obsessive need to render visible the experiences of the most vulnerable and most anonymous victims of political violence,” uses the domestic object and the materiality of mourning to hold contradictions that cannot be resolved, only witnessed.⁸ State of Transition asks its viewers to stand inside those same contradictions—to recognize in the compressed materials of the threshold an experience that belongs to millions of people alive today, including those who have found their way to the U.S.