Teresa Lanceta Weaves the Fraught History of Spain (2024)

VALLADOLID, Spain — In Teresa Lanceta’s weavings, the cyclical nature of human history is translated into warps and wefts. The Spanish artist and historian has produced conceptually and materially rigorous textile works since the 1970s that frame weaving not just as an artisanal technique, but as a pivotal cultural and political practice with far-reaching consequences. El sueño de la cólcedra, her solo exhibition at the Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, is a lyrical, site-specific investigation into the ways that textiles shaped Spain during the 13th and 14th centuries, a time when the Iberian Peninsula was a rich but embattled home to Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities.

Lanceta has a unique context for this ongoing project, which she began in 2022: The museum is located in a former monastery, and the chapel where her work is installed — previously known as the Capilla de los Condes de Fuensaldaña — was itself a burial place during the 14th century. The exhibition’s title, translating as “The dream of the quilt,” references a funerary textile that the Castilian King Alfonso VIII was buried with when he died in 1214 in Burgos. The piece is one of several important historical textiles that Lanceta researched and reinterpreted from the pivotal turning point in Spanish history when the northern Christian kingdoms began their “Reconquista” against the Muslim forces that had ruled much of the peninsula for centuries. Another is the Pendón de las Navas de Tolosa, a famous textile said to have been taken as loot by Alfonso VIII after he won a major battle against the Almohad leader Muhammad al-Nasir. Elements from the Pendón’s original design are incorporated into a series of colored pencil drawings in which Lanceta has superimposed illustrations of injured soldiers with severed limbs.

I think that Lanceta is interested in this moment because it continues to shape the country’s sense of national identity: In 2019, the right-wing political party Vox launched its first campaign from northern Spain directly citing the “Reconquista,” for example. However, the era’s violent power struggles reflect a broader historical continuum that she has long analyzed in her work. That she has done so primarily through weaving and textiles is one of the most transgressive elements of her practice. When she was beginning her career in the early 1970s, weaving was not widely accepted in the realm of fine art, much less using it to grapple with themes like the Spanish Civil War.

Words, writing, and reading are crucial to Lanceta’s practice, perhaps unsurprisingly given the etymological connection between “textile” and “text.” In one area of the exhibition, the artist has recorded herself reading poems that she wrote about three 13th-century noblewomen who were each betrayed by their husbands. Visitors can listen to her soft but resolute voice by pressing buttons on a table where other materials are displayed, including colored pencil drawings from 2023 that echo the delicate embroidery of her nearby hanging tapestries and lines from poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, Sandra Santana, and Anne Sexton. The installation’s table groupings present Lanceta’s complex associations across time and space and multifaceted production in concise, digestible chapters.

Lanceta’s work is full of layered references and threads of meaning that take time to unravel; in visiting El sueño de la cólcedra, I’ve only scratched the surface. But she also produces inventive, visually striking objects that are simply stunning to behold. Her tapestries hanging in a centuries-old burial chapel vividly remind us just how intimately textiles accompany us, living against our skin in daily life and shrouding us after our deaths.

Teresa Lanceta: El sueño de la cólcedra continues at the Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español (Calle Jorge Guillén, 6, Valladolid, Spain) through June 9. The exhibition was curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa.