Toda mi casa es un altar. Gema Polanco (PHotoESPAÑA 2026)

As part of the PHotoESPAÑA 2026 photography festival, running from 13 June to 8 November at the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, the artist Gema Polanco transforms the exhibition space into an intimate environment where the domestic and the sacred intertwine through textile installation.

Her project Toda mi casa es un altar expands the photographic medium beyond the fixed image, overflowing into the performative, the bodily and the sensorial.

Conceived as a site-specific intervention, the exhibition occupies the second floor of the museum and establishes a direct dialogue with its architecture and collections. The tour begins with a large suspended tapestry on the staircase, which acts as a threshold into the artist's universe. From there, flags, collages, costumes and amulets configure a landscape in which everyday objects acquire new symbolic dimensions.

Polanco's practice draws on artisanal processes, the self-taught spirit and the languages of popular culture. Her relationship with textiles and manual crafts stems from an organic and intuitive approach, where learning, adapting or inventing methods forms part of the creative process. In this coexistence between her works and the museum's heritage, the latter allows itself to be transformed, the author integrates herself into its rooms and what seemed stable adopts a new skin.

Thus, the house opens up to the invisible: a space where the everyday can become ritual and where each object holds the possibility of being a refuge, an offering or a promise. The visitor is invited to inhabit that threshold.