The weather according to Andrea Canepa

Valencia and Madrid,

One year after presenting the ephemeral pavilion in one of the patios of the Conde Duque Center Wasi Llamkha (Place and touch)which invited its viewers to close their eyes in a perimeter space to experience sensations through touch and sound, and not just sight, and which was inspired by forms of representation and recording from the pre-Columbian era and the treatise Memorial Arspopular in the Renaissance, the Peruvian Andrea Canepa offers two new proposals in Spain. They can be visited at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the still closed Crystal Palace of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Awaits us in Gallery 6 of the IVAM Between the deep and the distantan immersive installation spread over two floors and the staircase that connects them. In this case, its starting point was the essay The Spell of the Sensuousin which David Abram turned to sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache narrative, and his own experience as a conjurer to theorize, with a certain lyrical perspective, about the dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. Appealing to indigenous cosmologies, he affirmed that time is inscribed in the landscape, a fundamental notion in this Canepa project that in turn had to do with the inscription in the environment of other human concepts when societies preserved much closer ties with the immediate world. Especially in stages prior to the emergence of writing, in which the lived experience was more relevant in the assumption of knowledge and in our forms of sensitivity than what was read.

Its contents fit with the concerns of this creator from Lima, interested in the worldviews of the Andean peoples and their possible symbolic relationships with the myths of classical culture.

Andrea Canepa. Between the deep and the distant. IVAM. Photography: Juan García

At the Julio González Center, geometric structures, modular pieces, games of volume and color and shapes that evoke those of meccano-type toys will come our way; Both make reference to the performative dimension of the body, with which Canepa often works, and to the abstract aspect of knowledge, in addition to the confluences between the conception of the world and time on both sides of the ocean. To Hades, the Fates, the Serpent, the huacas or non-linearity.

The volumes of the lower floor allude to the deep and profound nature of the original spaces for all (the womb, the caves, even the underworld). This section of the installation, whose lighting montage favors the feeling of interiority, is articulated in layers: the soil sediments have been placed on the walls, sculptures that refer to the rings of the trees surround the space and the public can move between them. In the center of the room is a snake, that animal present in a good number of cultures and linked to the origin of everything, to sin or hell.

The fabric suspended on the staircase that leads to the upper floor refers to the transition from one state to another, to the crossing of a threshold, while, in the upper floor room, a metal line runs along the perimeter as a tangible horizon interrupted by sculptures. It refers to the system of ceques characteristic of pre-Columbian Andean society: the lines that, starting from Cuzco and reaching the entire Inca empire, organized the layout of the sanctuaries or huacas of the surroundings, according to a complex scheme of structuring, both spatial and religious, but also temporal, because each huaca It marked moments of the Inca calendar.

The materials with which the artist has worked, once again, are very diverse and appeal to our tactility: fabrics, thread, tiles, wood, earth or glass. Also to the past of his country, in relation to the quipus Andean, threads with knots that can be read with the hands, and that like a warp allude to continuity.

As for the Reina Sofía Crystal Palace, Canepa has joined today the artists who are designing a canvas to cover it while its restoration continues. Its installation is called Bale and evokes pre-Columbian funerary rites, specifically from the culture of Paracas, in which corpses were wrapped in a sum of textile layers; We are referring to a period between 800 and 100 BC in southern Peru. Given the aridity of the terrain, these fabrics have been preserved in good condition.

A mosaic of fabrics already surrounds the Crystal Palace, and will continue to do so throughout 2026, some with motifs that could correspond to those of pre-Hispanic cultures, and others smooth and monochrome. The different parts of the canvas have been placed around Velázquez Bosco’s building so that the image appears to be evolving.

The panels thus become frames that compose sequences in the covering and uncovering of fragments, a cyclical story that makes sense as the spectators surround the Palace. In the words of Canepa: On the cover the bundle is tied and as you walk through the building the layers come off, until you reach some bandages that you can’t see either.. As if it were a loop, the bundle is created again and the passage of time is marked by us on our walk only as we move.

To recreate the fabrics, Canepa has painted them in oils and then photographed them. He explains that oil painting is constructed in the same way as bales: It is painting in layers that overlap. Time also accumulates in layers.