Fardo. Andrea Canepa

Peruvian artist Andrea Canepa has been commissioned to create the second intervention on the canvas temporarily covering the Palacio de Cristal in Parque de El Retiro, part of the Museo Reina Sofía, during structural restoration and repair works. It will be on display from 13 January 2026 to 1 January 2027.

Her proposal forms part of the research initiated in the exhibition As We Dwell in the Fold (MSU Broad Museum, Michigan, 2023), focused on the textile bundles of the pre-Columbian Paracas culture and the ancestral ritual of wrapping their deceased. In this new project, the creator translates these ideas to the context of the Palacio de Cristal, whose iron and glass architecture, an emblem of a modernity also linked to technical advances, connects with the optical devices that preceded cinema. The artist thus turns the Palace into a contemporary praxinoscope that transforms its glass panes into sequences of covering and uncovering textiles, a cyclical narrative that makes sense as the public walks around the building.

Canepa's work shows a deep interest in the way objects, spaces and cultural structures construct narratives about memory and collective identity. Her creations maintain a dialogue between art, sociology, history and anthropology, from where she explores how organisational systems — visual, spatial or symbolic — not only condition the ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world, but are deeply rooted constructs that often operate in a directed manner.

Her installations, sculptures and textiles are conceived as habitable experiences with a temporal dimension. Canepa also incorporates colour, changes in scale and the alteration of inherited languages as strategies of estrangement that activate in the public a questioning of dominant cultural grammars. In this way, her works bring seemingly distant themes into the present