Teresa Lanceta: Weaving as Open Source | Exhibition | MACBA (2024)

For Teresa Lanceta (Barcelona, 1951), the act of weaving constitutes a triggering of critical imagination beyond the confines of materiality. For her, weaving is an open-source formula of repetition and rupture, from which it is possible to read, transform and convey a knowledge that is always complex and plural. It is a procedure for which there is no rough outline to follow; where figure and ground, object and language, medium and image, come together at the same time, assuming the unexpected, along with error and success. Accepting the unexpected is for Lanceta a way of learning a primordial and universal source or code that clearly manifests an internal law; a law that transcends physical, temporal and cultural frontiers. For weaving is a techné – a ‘technical’ knowledge dependent on a specific geographical, cultural and human context, be it, in her case, Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood, where she lived, or the Middle Atlas, which she visited every year for three decades. Both of these places fed her fascination for women’s work and the non-verbal communication of stories and emotional bonds.

Teresa Lanceta. Weaving as Open Source traces the artist’s trajectory from the 1970s through to the present day and includes a broad selection of tapestries, weavings, fabrics, drawings, photographs and videos, offering the most comprehensive overview of her work to date. The exhibition also explores Lanceta’s interest in collaborative work formats based around dialogues that she establishes with the help of ‘creative accomplices’, including Olga Diego, Pedro G. Romero and Xabier Salaberria; the curator Leire Vergara; the art collective La Trinxera; the filmmaker Virginia García del Pino; the artist and thinker Nicolas Malevé who, together with members of the Museum’s Education Department and pupils and teachers from Miquel Tarradell secondary school, has spent the last few years developing the project The Trades in the Raval.