Teresa Lanceta
Farewell to the Rhombus
November 3, 2016–January 29, 2017
Azkuna Zentroa
Plaza Arriquibar, 4
48010 Bilbao
Spain
info [at] azkunazentroa.com
www.azkunazentroa.com
Curated by Nuria Enguita Mayo
Azkuna Zentroa is pleased to present Farewell to the Rhombus, an exhibition that features the work of Teresa Lanceta. A coproduction with Fundación Montemadrid’s La Casa Encendida, curated by Nuria Enguita Mayo. The show offers a tour of this artist’s personal universe, where weaves, geometric designs and folk art intertwine with the emotional nuances and complexities of an investigation centred on communities of women weavers in the Middle Atlas. The exhibition features woven fabrics, paintings, drawings, a text and several videos compiled from her interviews with both women of that region and relatives who migrated to Spain.
In addition to Lanceta’s work, the exhibition includes the work of five young artists interested in traditional craftsmanship and migration. There are also two collaborations: Nicolas Malevé, who created a digital map of patterns and objects of the Middle Atlas, and Lot Amorós, producer of an interactive audio-visual installation based on a binary code.
Farewell to the Rhombus is the third large exhibition by Teresa Lanceta dedicated to the fabrics and knowledge of women weavers from the Middle Atlas, a project that the artist started in 1985. Since then, the artist’s interest in everything surrounding this manufacture and in the basic structure of these fabrics has led her to explore in depth their material nature.
Since the mid-1970s, Lanceta made the decision to weave as a form of artistic expression, pushing the limits of what is understood as art. Thus, her approach to fabrics started with what is original and unique to the fabrics: their weaves, materials, traditions and techniques.
Under these premises, one decade later, the artist lived with women weavers from the Middle Atlas, where through their textile traditions—knowledge passed down through the generations—she took part in a collective discovery that had enabled people to make a living, communicate and remain. An art marked by a series of ancestral rules, themes and habits the mastery of which enables expressive freedom and creation. For the nomadic weavers it is a way of portraying the world; the tapestries reflect stories, events and experiences. Trade and creativity, technique and thought are unified by achieving those pivotal moments that transform what is known and hint at what is hidden. The tapestries transcend their decorative purpose or symbolic functionality: they are part of an ancestral and quotidian lifestyle and knowledge, and as such they release their ornamental and artistic power.
Linking her work to these practices, weaving has allowed Teresa Lanceta to understand a primeval and universal code that clearly manifests its internal law, a law that reaches beyond physical, temporal and cultural borders and which nurtures creative imagination. Her work defends the usefulness of collective art and creation as opposed to the idea of the individual genius. Collective art as the result of the creativity of specific people, an open source code that can be read, transformed and transmitted.
This exhibition and the catalogue accompanying it attempt to approach the artistic practice of Teresa Lanceta, recognizing in her fabrics “complex devices” to inhabit, in short, an artistic practice as a way to be present in the world.
