Andrea Canepa

Andrea Canepa (Lima, 1980) presents her work for the second intervention to adorn the canvas temporarily covering the Palacio de Cristal while restoration and repair work is being carried out on its structure. The creations of this artist come into being from a keen interest in the way in which objects, spaces and cultural structures build narratives on memory and collective identity. Her practice is situated in a territory of dialogue between art, sociology, history and anthropology, a place from which she explores how systems of organisation — visual, spatial, symbolic — not only condition our ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world but are also engrained constructs which often operate in a way that is targeted. Canepa addresses these logics as objects of study, drawing from sustained research which often connects with her country’s past and the history of Latin America.

The artist conceives of her installations, sculptures and textiles as habitable experiences which are not without a temporary dimension that makes them more complex — time entails transit, exploration and pathways to recompose the work. She brings in colour, a change of scale and alterations to languages handed down as strategies of estrangement which activate in the viewer a critical questioning of the dominant cultural grammar. Consequently, her works bring to the present questions which are seemingly distant in space and time and which poetically and critically raise questions around our way of being in the world.   

Andrea Canepa’s proposal is part of research she began in the show As We Dwell in the Fold (MSU Broad Museum, Michigan, 2023), which focused on the textile bundles in the pre-Columbian culture of Paracas and the ancestral ritual of wrapping their dead. This new project sees Canepa transfer these ideas to the context of the Palacio de Cristal, a nineteenth-century building shaped by its transparency and exhibition logic. Its iron-and-glass architecture, symbolising a modernity also bound up with technical advances, connects with the optical artefacts prefiguring cinema. The artist thus turns the Palacio into a contemporary praxinoscope which transforms its glass panels into sequences covering and discovering textiles, a cyclical narrative which gathers meaning as the visitor moves around the building.