At the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, “La noche y las palabras” (The Night and the Words) offers an immersive, rigorous look into the multidisciplinary practice of Leandro Katz. Spanning decades of conceptual photography, film, and archival research, the exhibition operates less like a standard retrospective and more like an ongoing investigation into how history is constructed, recorded, and ultimately romanticized.

Central to the exhibition is Katz’s long-standing obsession with the intersection of language, archaeology, and the visual document. His famous project re-evaluating the 19th-century expeditions of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood takes center stage. Rather than merely re-photographing Maya ruins, Katz lays bare the colonial gaze embedded within early visual archaeology. By aligning contemporary photographic plates with Catherwood’s lithographs, he fractures the myth of the objective visual record, forcing the viewer to confront the gaps between what was drawn, what was captured, and what was lost.

What makes “La noche y las palabras” so compelling in the flesh is its pacing. Katz treats text not as an explanatory accompaniment to images, but as a material force. Words appear as projections, typographies engraved into landscapes, or lyrical fragments that destabilize the images they sit beside. In his celebrated lunar photography series, the passage of time is rendered almost tangible; the moon becomes an alphabet, a shifting symbol recorded through precise, poetic discipline.