Fardo. Andrea Canepa

The Peruvian artist, Andrea Canepa is responsible for the second part of the canvas that will temporarily cover the Reina Sofía Museum’s Crystal Palace in El Retiro Park during the restoration and repair of its structure. It will be on display from 13 January 2026 until 1 January 2027.

Her proposal is part of the research she began in the As We Dwell in the Fold exhibition (MSU Broad Museum, Michigan, 2023), which focused on the textile bundles in the pre-Columbian culture of Paracas and on the ancestral ritual of wrapping their dead. In this latest project, Canepa transfers these ideas to the context of the Crystal Palace, whose iron and glass architecture, which is an emblem of modernity linked to technical advances, connects with the optical artefacts that existed before film. Therefore, the artist turns the Palace into a contemporary praxinoscope, which transforms its glass panels into sequences covering and uncovering textiles, a cyclical tale which makes sense as visitors walk around the building.  

Canepa’s work shows a keen interest in the way in which cultural objects, spaces and structures build narratives on memory and joint identity.  Her creations enter into dialogue between art, sociology, history and anthropology, from where she explores how systems of organisation — visual, spatial or symbolic — not only condition the way in which the world is perceived and inhabited, but they are also deeply rooted constructs that are often directed.  

Her installations, sculptures and textiles are conceived as habitable experiences with a temporary dimension. Canepa incorporates colour, a change of scale and alterations to languages passed down as strategies of estrangement which make visitors question the dominant cultural grammar.  Therefore, her work brings topics to the present which appear to be far away in both space and time, poetically and critically questioning around the way of living in the world.  

Image Credit:

Andrea Canepa, Bundle, 2025-2026, detail