The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba), one of the most visited museums in Argentina, inaugurated in April two exhibitions that closely follow the work of textile artists from Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru. One of them, entitled "Tejer las Piedras" (Weaving the Stones), features Peruvian Ana Teresa Barboza and gathers fourteen works produced during the last five years that condense several recurring elements in her work. Three pieces were made especially for the exhibition, among them "Quebradas que forman redes" (2022), conceived as a site-specific work for the museum's triple height.

"Hilo continuo" (2017) by Ana Teresa Barboza

This exhibition explores the connections between textiles and indigenous communities from a contemporary art perspective. In Barboza's works, the territories take on new life and show other ways of being and doing from a contemporary art perspective towards knowing how to work the materials available in a territory and the making of handcrafted objects, imprinting transformation as a possibility.

Barboza is characterized by using embroidery, tapestry, and basketry techniques and working with cotton threads, wool, stones, and reeds; both in large installations and in small tapestries and intervened photographs.

Textile work has many layers and when one sees a textile piece one does not see all the process behind it. In Peru, different traditional textile practices are still preserved. In these communities, they manage to understand the space where they live and use what they have around them to be able to produce textiles, basketry, or stone work.

"Urdir" (2018) by Ana Teresa Barboza

"Ovillos" (2017) by Ana Teresa Barboza

In this way, through ethnographic work, Barboza explores textiles as a testimony of tradition, nature, and indigenous origins. In her photographs, the image is woven from geological, climatic, and hydrological maps of the areas portrayed. The threads that make up the image are made from animal and vegetable fibers and dyed with natural dyes by communities close to the landscape portrayed in the intervened photos. The textiles do not resemble any other material because they form an interweaving between life and art.

In tapestry and embroidery, Ana Teresa Barboza explores ancient practices and indigenous materials, such as pre-colonial cotton and wool, to recover them, on the one hand, in their private and reflexive dimension and, on the other, as a collective practice, as a way of inhabiting the territory and its traditions.

"Tejer las Piedras", curated by Verónica Rossi, remains impregnated in the viewer's mind. It is a surprising exhibition, where textile art does not have the same artistic status as others.