Yuri Leonardo Works

A jewellery store in a shopping mall, designed as one project with the sculpture on its front. The plan divides the unit into three rooms — shop, office, storeroom — with four new block walls, one of which carries the front display. Inside: an L-shaped showcase in wood and glass, the back of the shop clad in vertical wood panels, a suspended ceiling of perforated steel, and a palette of black, natural wood and gold. On the front: a five-metre sculpture in wood, CNC-cut, in three pieces. It was my first major commission as a sculptor in the Dominican Republic.

A line of urban bags in three models, taken to a fourth prototype and a usability test. My text for the project opens with a scene in Paris: a man on a bike, an empty shoulder bag folded around his body like a jacket. The response is a large bag that goes completely flat when empty, sized for a whole day of working tools. The making was part of the project: one of its stated aims was to work in direct collaboration with Dominican artisans on the manufacturing phases, and to bring the quality of their craft to international markets.

Graduation thesis at UNPHU, Santo Domingo, 2003, awarded at the 2006 edition of the Santo Domingo International Architecture Biennial. The problem it set itself was the Dominican dwelling: how to move from the minimal traditional unit to a coherent residential space for the modern Dominican individual. Through a group of essays and exercises, the thesis proposed an abstract reinterpretation of the relationship between individual and habitat — a dwelling that takes into its core the temporality of present-day life and the cycles that define its needs, away from the traditional symbols of the twentieth century. The Dominican dwelling returns eleven years later, in the essay About Galerías (2014), as the loss of the gallery.

A villa in Punta Cana, on a golf course, needed repairs before going onto short-stay platforms: paint, leaks, electrical work. Its setting is part of what it offers, and the photographs take in the fairway as well as the house. The brief set a target guest and asked for a durable fit-out with low maintenance, and for professional photographs that would show the qualities of the space. By the end of June 2026 the works were in their final phase and the photographs had been taken. Its expense record later served as an approximate, payment-to-payment measure of suppliers' lead times for another house's works programme.

A house in Santo Domingo, in very good condition, was to be adapted for rental to executives and families of six to ten guests. The first works, planned as minor repairs, were in fact the demolition of a gazebo and the construction of a platform for a spa; the design starts from what was actually built, not from what was planned. The spa is now to be moved, and the current stage is the garden around it.

Master-plan competition, 2013, for a new city in Santo Domingo; project architect, with Juan Mubarak as project director. The site's perimeter is formed by a series of peripheral elements that press its limits toward the geometric centre; the result is a polygon whose vertices act as doors to the rest of the city and to the interior of the country. The inner structure of the plan is traced by connecting those doors. The plan is based on a system in which every element can hold several complementary positions at once: ensuring coherence between the functioning and the development of its immediate context, and constantly regenerating itself to adapt to future territorial realities, so guaranteeing the city's continuum in time.

Study model for a residential project commissioned by a private client in Santo Domingo, as architect-in-charge. The model, 50 × 30 × 15 cm, is built in plexiglas and tape. It was awarded at the 2006 edition of the Santo Domingo International Architecture Biennial, as part of the thesis A Proposal to Inhabit. The model for Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 (2007) is also in plexiglas.

Competition entry, 2007, for a 2050 vision of the Greater Helsinki region, as architect-in-charge with the architects Laura Barbieri and Eugenio Mangi. The region sits on a transversal axis, from western Uusimaa to the Russian border, that splits at Helsinki into two national routes; it had grown radially from the city, losing importance and density as it moved away. To reduce that dispersion, the proposal sews the two routes together with two axes, two different ways of connecting Mäntsälä and Helsinki. Superposed, they draw a possible relation between the scales of data exchange — global, national, regional — and those of territory. The municipalities form a ring, which allows significant natural areas to be drawn inside it.

Commissioned study, 2013, for 240 apartments in Santo Domingo, for Shearly Investment Group; architect-in-charge, with Juan Mubarak as project director. The site has a difficult shape and is bounded on three of its four sides by an avenue and two streets. The problem was to distribute the 240 apartments so that they answer their urban situation, relate to the low-density buildings around them and, at the same time, hold a structured dialogue with the interior of the site. The project opens a series of open-air pockets, triangle-shaped, each giving a different scale and identity to its part of the resulting courtyard — a reflection of the diversity of scale in the surrounding area.

Commissioned study, 2011–2012, for a national museum devoted to the lifework of the Dominican scientist Eugenio de Jesús Marcano, on a site within the Botanical Garden of Santo Domingo; architect-in-charge, with Shaney Peña Gómez as associate architect. The main idea was a place that guides visitors through the exhibition pavilions while they remain in contact with the existing vegetation. The project is an open installation set among a family of 107 trees: a horizontal spiral that organises the exhibition around three courtyards. The north side opens entirely to the garden; the south façade is a long vertical garden that filters the Caribbean sun. Every tree already on the site is kept.

Study, 2012–2013, for a new Dominican–Haitian border region; architect-in-charge, with Shaney Peña Gómez as associate architect. The line read as the border is a graphic representation of one aspect of a larger reality: the centre of a region more complex than a political symbol. Haiti and the Dominican Republic develop outward from their capitals, which leaves the border as the furthest point of each country and penalises its growth. The study identifies the infrastructure that would give this region economic and political autonomy in proportion to its size and, in a second phase, a supranational connection to a global context. It follows Cartography of an Object (UNPHU, 2008), a workshop on the same border.

Twenty-six portraits in pastel, charcoal and graphite, drawn at the Cité internationale des arts in the months after the Paris attacks of November 2015. The question: if the attacks stirred patriotism and nationalism among the local-born, what did they stir among immigrants? I drew anonymous people rather than the known victims, keeping a distance that lets the viewer imagine the person could be oneself, a friend, a relative. Pastel works against the immediacy of the realistic portrait: the figure stays behind a blur, and the drawing carries a memory more than a likeness.

Two drawings, 360 × 240 cm each, in ink, graphite and polyurethane on wood, commissioned by the Centro Cultural de España in Santo Domingo and shown in my solo exhibition Ausentes (2017). They come from Beloved Veils: two of its twenty-four preliminary studies became this project. The text asks what happens when someone is forced to leave a country and start again elsewhere: memory and history, it says, stop being unconscious and become 'conscious and tangible bodies'.

A block of wood conceived to be cut in sections. Inside it, a core that reads as a traditional sculpture; around it, three outer pieces that work as its moulds — what carving usually throws away, kept and shown. Each of the four volumes is built from four hundred sheets of 1.2 mm wood, each drawn one by one, laser-cut and assembled by hand, from a set of fifteen section drawings. Rialengo is the Dominican word for the animals that live in the street. It is one of my first works on absence. It is the origin of the YLW logo.

The brief was to map the historic sector of La Medina, in Dakar. The response was a series of informal maps, traced — in my word, written — in nails, string and spray, from the external view of a first-time visitor: a red installation fifty-four metres long. It was commissioned by IFAA, curated by Sithabile Mlotshwa, and shown in the OFF Program of Dak'Art 2016. Its central sentence — informal maps as a way to recognise a territory and to pass tradition on — returns almost word for word in my texts of 2018 and 2025.

In 2018 Michael Sailstorfer engaged me as a freelance designer. I worked with the artist on the exhibition design and the selection of works for his exhibitions of that period, and designed and built some of the sculptures shown in them: the full-scale originals, in cardboard and tape, from which subcontractors produced the casts and the hyperrealist finish. Those exhibitions are his. My workbook records the full-scale casting models made for Brainspotting, Avlskarl Gallery, Copenhagen, 2018. The work is representation in its most literal sense: a model exact enough for another hand to turn it into the sculpture.

Eight pencil drawings and fourteen collages on two Dominican questions: the sale of the land at Bahía de las Águilas, and the relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The title is a line from Allen Ginsberg's Wichita Vortex Sutra. In my statement, the way the pieces are built seeks to abstract the universal side of two local themes: the figures are transformed until they exceed any notion of race and origin — individuals from neither here nor there. The migrant returns as the subject of later work: On Absence (2016), the proposal Sentient Mansan (2018), '15562' (2025).

A silent object that becomes an instrument when it is played. Built in wood, piano strings, aluminium and spray, 150 × 75 × 255 cm, it was made for a fifteen-minute performance with saxophone, Chinese harp and double bass, on a composition by Luise Volkmann, in the Auditorium of the Cité internationale des arts. The starting point was Roland Barthes' text Racine est Racine: Volkmann answered it by translating Charlie Parker into her own language; I answered it with the object. Two years later, the proposal Sentient Mansan again ends with a performance on an instrument of my own design.

A series across three media. In 2013: three drawings in pastel and graphite, 140 × 90 cm, and six collages on paper, the collages commissioned by the Centro Cultural de España in Santo Domingo and shown in O Tender Fellows (2014). In 2016, on wood: two drawings in graphite and pierre noire, 130 × 90 cm, and one in graphite, 80 × 120 cm (Berlin, 2016).

One beloved person, drawn and redrawn from memory over and over again: almost forty studies since a first phase in 2014–2017, and a current phase begun in 2024 — acrylic, ink, graphite and polyurethane on wood, 122 × 180 cm. Each study answers a different need and is a different way of remembering the same individual. The question behind it is what migration does to memory, which he frames as «the multiple lives (and deaths) of a single individual during his/hers own migratory movements». It is an evolution of the initial project, and it is ongoing.

The drawing practice that began in 2011, under the title I gave it on my former website. Collage notebooks of 2012 (Scrapbook No.12) and the collages AUA (details), of the same year. Large sheets of 2013 in pastel and graphite, 140 × 90 cm — portraits, a self-portrait, Fail again, fail better, L'Imprudent — and, at 70 × 100 cm, Paisaje I. Four Études of 2014 in pastel, charcoal and graphite, 60 × 45 cm. A pair of portraits burnt into wood by laser pyrography, 120 × 80 cm, in 2014. Portraits of 2015 in pastel, charcoal and graphite, 120 × 80 cm.

An outdoor sculpture for Paris by the Cameroonian artist Malam, commissioned by La Maison de l'Agriculture for the centenary of the Cité Universitaire and set to be built in the summer of 2025: a column 400 × 60 cm in cast resin and corten iron. The work is Malam's. My role was Technical Consultant: to assure the technical aspects of the construction, installation and perennial permanence on site. The project was suspended; the sculpture was not installed. The collaboration did not begin there: in February and March 2016 I worked in Malam's studio at the Cité internationale des arts.

A proposal, not a built work. Its subject is migration across three moments: the first prehistoric movements out of Africa, the slave ships bound for the Americas, and migration today. It has three parts. Beloved Veils: twenty-four drawn veils of one person. Ruminants: large sculptures cast in concrete, with suspended cylinders, rolling spheres and chains striking their inner walls, and microphones inside. Growl: a sound performance on an instrument to be designed and built. In the proposal, the continuous sound is the fourth element that joins the three, in a room lined with construction plastic.

Twenty-four veils of one person, drawn and redrawn from memory over four years, each a different way of remembering the same individual. As the face disappears, the subject loses gender, race and age and becomes 'the memory of everything else reflected on the portrait of one specific individual'. I call the veils informal cartographies — the term of my maps of territory. A first phase of twelve drawings in ink and graphite on paper, up to 300 × 300 cm, remains in study development. It was to be one of the three parts of the proposal Sentient Mansan.