Fardo. Andrea Canepa

Intervention by Peruvian artist Andrea Canepa on the tarpaulin covering the Palacio de Cristal in the Retiro, with textiles inspired by the pre-Columbian Paracas bundles.

Andrea Canepa's proposal occupies the Palacio de Cristal in El Retiro Park, a building that belongs to the Museo Reina Sofía and that remains covered by a tarpaulin while restoration and repair work is carried out on its structure. It is the second intervention carried out on that covering, and it is designed to be experienced from outside the building.

The artist builds on research begun in the exhibition As We Dwell in the Fold, presented at the MSU Broad Museum in Michigan. That work focused on the textile bundles of the pre-Columbian Paracas culture and on the ritual of wrapping the dead. Here she carries those ideas over to the iron and glass architecture of the Palacio, a building linked to the technical advances of modernity, and relates it to the optical devices that anticipated cinema.

Canepa turns the building into a contemporary praxinoscope: its glass panes become sequences of covering and uncovering textiles, a cyclical narrative that takes on meaning according to how the public moves around the building. Her work, which combines art, sociology, history and anthropology, examines how visual, spatial or symbolic systems organise memory and collective identity. It incorporates colour, changes of scale and the alteration of inherited languages to question the dominant cultural grammars.