Paola Torres Núñez del Prado

The installation Awasqa Kayku unfolds from the Glanzstoff water tower in the form of 15-metre-long textile sculptures that intertwine past and present in the analogue and digital realms. Inspired by medieval banners, the textiles descend the tower from top to bottom, presenting patterns and glitches in their weave. Towards the base, their threads unravel and bind them together with stones from the site, echoing shicra. This ancient Peruvian architectural practice used the motion of fibre-wrapped stones in a building’s foundation to absorb seismic shocks. The coded knots also contain a message that can be read by an app, offering an augmented reality experience that shares the history of the factory and of the piece itself. The textile paintings also serve as a score for the corresponding sound compositions that are inspired by water and the human voice. 

Much like life itself, the textile’s dynamic design incorporates glitches and erasures into its threads. Paola emphasises the significance of these apparent “disruptions”, drawing from her pictorial exploration through textiles, glitch art and sound. For her, these glitches are placed beyond the digital realm, addressing the economic and social challenges of a specific context in Peruvian Art. In this textile framework, Paola suggests that an interruption in the pattern serves as a material act, liberating the weaver from parametrising impulses. 

Awasqa Kayku is an exploration of interconnectedness rooted in Andean Quechua philosophy. In this work, the artist appeals against the erasure of her Andean ancestry by evoking ancestral beliefs, in which reality exists as a holistic system of interrelated beings and events—space and time, sacred and mundane or beauty in a glitch. This “cosmic weaving” ties together human and nonhuman realities, forming a connected family known as an ayllu. One becomes an active yet interchangeable thread in the pattern. Awasqa Kayku thus translates from Quechua as “to be woven” and “to be a pattern”. A pattern that, sometimes, becomes glitched. 

The piece is located on a former water tower, a place of storage, survival and emergency that also has a backstory of violent industrialisation and forced labour. The glitched textile invites us to read it almost like a text—a long story of loss, beauty and the cyclical nature of order, chaos and organisation. By promising a fusion of material and metaphysical elements, Awasqa Kayku provokes contemplation of the intricate dynamics of life and its finite nature.

Paola Torrez Núñez de Prado (1979, Lima) is an artist and researcher of transdisciplinarity, working with textile assemblages and embroideries, painting, sound, digital media, interactive art, and video. Using both contemporary and ancient/ traditional technologies, she explores the limits of sensorial experience by examining concepts like interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation while exerting a critical view upon the hegemonic history of technology and the arts. She is the recipient of the Artists + Machine Intelligence Grant from Google Arts and Culture and Google AI. Her works are in collections of the Swedish Public Art Agency (2018), Malmo City Museum (2017), and she was the winner of the “Local Media: Amazon Ecoregion” contest of Vivo Arte.mov in Brazil (2013).