The works of Ana Theresa Barboza They awaken the desire to touch them and discover their different textures: cotton threads, wool, stones, reeds. Its colors, materials and shapes converse with the ancient textiles from the coast of Peru and narrate the close relationship between local communities and their natural environment. Through their hangingsthe artist weaves a link between the landscape she evokes and the viewer.
Born in Lime in 1981, Ana Theresa Barboza she expresses herself through her fabrics and travels extensively throughout Peru seeking inspiration in landscapes, techniques and materials and recovering the ancestral traditions of the local populations where she learned different techniques such as tapestry and basketry. Barboza records his research to later incorporate it into his work, which he carries out in his studio in Lima and in his workshop in Lobitos, a small coastal town in the north of the country, near the border with Ecuador. He studied Fine Arts in Lima, where he began early to experiment with threads and fabrics and, while still a student, made his first works with the techniques of embroidery, patchwork and quilting.
Inspired by the memory of her mother, who died at that time, the artist created works using patchwork, a technique historically linked to sewing as a family memory and archive. Her grandmother sewed for her, embroidered and knitted, and she taught her how to use the sewing machine. Since then, Barboza used elements that would remain in her work through the years: embroidery, collage, and unfinished work that enhances manual labor as a process.
I learned about the work of Ana Teresa Barboza in a workshop on contemporary textile practices given by the textile artist Guillermina Baiguera in 2011, at the Formosa gallery in Buenos Aires, where we attended once a week to embroider and study historical and current textile artists as a reference for our investigations. There the germ of this exhibition was conceived, between fabrics, embroidery and archives, which led to a visit to Lima to work with Ana Teresa Barboza in the assembly of the exhibition in Malba.
The works included inWeave the stones, Barboza’s first individual exhibition in Argentina, belong to the last five years of his production and condense several recurring elements in his work. Observation of the landscape and interest in nature and its accidents are essential, but also respect for social network relations, which refer to her textile work and the community links assumed in the materials used for her pieces, which are mostly part tapestries made by hand together with a group of weavers from the coastal communities with which she works.
For the exhibition in Malba he made three works, one of them, “streams that form networks” of large format that can be seen hanging from the entrance of the museum and that materializes a work of the artist for 3 months together with 5 weavers, who we saw working during our visit to Lima, where we visited the archaeological remains in Pachacamac, a place that was a monastery of weavers in the Inca period and where the desert climate is felt, the earth flies and we come across stones, the same ones that knew how to take care of the textile vestiges from very past times.
Ana Teresa’s works discover the invisible threads that unite the textile practice with the territory inhabited by generations, with its techniques and diverse languages. Her work weaves in and out of the edges of the canvas without shutting down her virtuosic process, defying the boundaries between art and craft.
by Veronica Rossi
