Ivannia Lasso Urban Decay and Memory in San José

The city of San José, Costa Rica, is as a living archive of time and transformation for visual artist Ivannia Lasso. Born in 1984, Lasso’s work focuses on the material textures of urban life, highlighting the wear and tear that cities accumulate as a testament to memory and change. Her practice spans painting, assembly, and installation, offering a tactile engagement with themes of decay and renewal.

Recently, MÍRAME visited two significant exhibitions featuring Lasso’s work: a solo show at the Spanish Cultural Centre of Costa Rica and the CROMA Biennial at the Eszacu Country Club. These showcases reinforced her position as a compelling voice in Costa Rica’s contemporary art scene.

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Urban Materiality as a Subject

Lasso urban decay is rooted in the textures of the city—flaking paint, rust, and graffiti—that show the passage of time and the layers of history embedded in urban spaces. Her methodical approach to these themes is informed by her academic background, including a degree in Arts and Visual Communication from the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica and additional training in education from Universidad San Marcos.

A key part of her practice involves venturing into neighbourhoods across San José to collect discarded materials, particularly wood, which forms the basis of many of her pieces. This process often takes her into challenging and occasionally unsafe areas, but it is central to her creative philosophy. Each retrieved fragment tells its own story, with scratches, splinters, and layers of paint that she preserves as essential components of her work.

These materials, sourced directly from the city’s streets, reflect the layered narratives of urban life and give her art a direct and unfiltered connection to its environment. By incorporating these elements, Lasso transforms her works from simple representations into physical interventions, compelling viewers to consider the life cycle of materials and the stories they carry.

Her hands-on approach is an act of engagement with the city on its own terms, confronting its complexities and contradictions while grounding her work in authenticity and resilience.

Introducing Crowded Spaces: Confronting Inequality

Lasso’s latest body of work, titled Crowded Spaces, tackles the theme of social and economic inequality found in overcrowded and neglected urban environments. In this new series, she assembles found objects and reclaimed wood—often discarded in the most socially and economically marginalised communities—creating compositions that reflect the oppressive conditions of overcrowded housing in Latin America.

Each piece in Crowded Spaces addresses housing disparity and social exclusion in informal territories. Lasso’s use of reclaimed materials from these areas highlights their overlooked status, while the chaotic formats and raw materials reflect both the harsh conditions and resilience of the communities living there.

Part of this series is "Asentamientos", which is part of the collection of the Costa Rican Museum of Art in San José.

Ivannia Lasso, Asentamientos, Reclaimed wood & mixed media

Lasso Urban Decay. A Highlight at the Spanish Cultural Centre

As part of the exhibition celebrating 40 years of Spanish Cooperation, Lasso contributed a piece that exemplified her artistic concerns (image of the piece in blog title). The piece, a large-scale composition made with vertical slats of wood in varying colours, spoke to her ongoing engagement with materiality and the visual language of urban surfaces.

The vertical wooden elements, marked by subtle shifts in hue and texture, evoked the layered and weathered quality of San José’s built environment. Its presence in the show offered a compelling distillation of her practice, blending formal rigour with a sensitivity to place and memory.

A Broader Platform: The CROMA Biennial

Ivannia Lasso's work celebrated at the CROMA Biennial.

At the CROMA Biennial, Lasso’s work was presented alongside other prominent artists, providing an opportunity to assess her practice within the context of Costa Rica’s contemporary art scene. Her contributions stood out for their rigorous exploration of urban themes, which challenged traditional notions of aesthetic beauty.

We learned how Lasso deliberately leaves the edges of her wooden elements rough, allowing the rawness to become part of the work’s narrative. This approach reflects her commitment to preserving the authenticity of her materials, reinforcing the themes of impermanence and transformation that underpin her practice. By embracing the imperfections and irregularities of the wood, she draws parallels to the worn and rugged surfaces of San José’s urban landscape, engaging with the unfinished and the unvarnished.

The result is work that feels grounded in the physical reality of its source material, offering a tactile connection to the city’s textures and a refusal to sanitise its complexities.

From Local Practice to International Recognition

Although Lasso urban decay is deeply tied to San José, her reach extends internationally. She has participated in exhibitions in Portugal, New York, and El Salvador, as well as collaborating with feminist collectives such as Casa Ma. Her selection for the Panama Fem Art Coalition internship in 2021 allowed her to expand her engagement with feminist discourses, a perspective that often informs her work.

In 2022, her practice received further recognition when her work was selected for the Visual Arts Salon at the Museo de Arte Costarricense, alongside a government grant to support her production. These achievements mark Lasso as a chronicler of urban transformation as well as a contributor to broader conversations about identity and materiality in contemporary art.

The City as a Living Entity

Lasso’s focus on San José’s surfaces reminds us that cities are not static entities but living systems shaped by time, weather, and human activity. Her ability to identify significance in the worn and the discarded encourages a reassessment of how urban spaces are experienced and valued.

Through her nuanced approach to material and subject matter, Lasso brings attention to the stories embedded in the textures of everyday life. Her work offers meditation on the relationship between place and memory, forging connections that resonate far beyond the physical boundaries of San José.

As MÍRAME observed during her recent exhibitions, Lasso urban decay practice reflects on how cities evolve and endure, making her an essential voice in the ongoing conversation about art and the urban experience.

Ivannia Lasso Urban Decay