I arrive at our first meeting rattled—to put it mildly. Driving our small rental car on the narrow streets of Alicante to Teresa Lanceta’s address, my mother had pointed out the navigation system was set on walking rather than driving. I had thought the streets were a tight squeeze, but by the time reality had struck it was too late. Forward was the only option.
Another visit eight years later and Lanceta has moved to the outskirts of the city. This time it is my taxi driver who can’t find the address. Rather than unceremoniously boot me out, the driver and several pedestrians become engaged in the hunt. The taxi driver is eager for assurances that he has delivered me to the correct spot. Luckily, he has.
Suffice to say I have visited Lanceta’s studio on several occasions, enjoying conversation despite the fact that we do not share a language. My most recent visit, with curators from Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, cycles between French and Spanish—both languages my high school transcript recorded as failed. What we cannot find in words, we communicate through other means.
Gesturing to her modest height, Lanceta admits with self-deprecating humor that her first creative aspirations to be a singer and dancer were not matched by her particular talents. Between 1969 and 1985, Lanceta lived among flamenco artists in Barcelona’s El Raval district in what was then known as Barrio Chino, with the Gitanos, or Romani, community. The collective ownership she both witnessed and experienced during those years continues to inform her work today.
When Lanceta committed herself to weaving in the 1980s, textiles were experiencing none of their current attention. Her fascination with weaving was cemented through a friendship with the late self-taught Dutch anthropologist Bert Flint, with whom she first traveled in Morocco. She complemented Flint’s considerable linguistic skills with her firsthand knowledge of weaving. The pair visited the Middle Atlas Mountains to learn about the woven textiles made by women in what at the time were still-isolated villages.
In 1998, Lanceta completed a PhD in art history at the Complutense University of Madrid with a dissertation titled “Fringes, Triangles and Squares: Structures of Repetition in Textile Traditions and Among 20th-Century Artists,” mapping the presence of geometry in visual art, including many sources that also fueled her own artistic inspiration. Where European art history has—at least until very recently—tended to dwell on the creative inspiration of individuals, Lanceta turned her textile study and practice to the collective and set about questioning fixed ideas of what really constitutes “original” or “authentic.”
This collective, research-based approach has led to some of Lanceta’s most exciting exhibition strategies, which often display her woven textiles alongside original sources of inspiration. When presented as a series, the textiles appear equally related and not related. Lanceta often weaves with relatively thick wool thread, incorporating lozenges, diagonals, and stripes that carry a sense of speed and thrill. Nearby, historical reference textiles are a reminder of detail, nuance, and refinement. The groupings expose how textile patterns move and inform other patterns, in reality belonging to no single original owner.
Lanceta has also drawn inspiration from closer to home: woven jarapas (rugs) traditional to the Alpujarras of Andalusia from recycled clothing; Arab-influenced mosaics perhaps best known in the Islamic architecture of Granada’s Alhambra. More recently, she has turned to bold stitched canvases that draw, once again, on her early experience of life in Barcelona’s El Raval. Often installed to create a maze-like experience for the viewer, these pieced works suggest energy over perfection—imprecise and utterly exuberant.
Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She edited The Textile Reader (2012/2023), an anthology of critical and creative writing about textiles and is Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Teresa Lanceta: La mémoire tissée is on view at Musée d’art moderne de Céret through June 2, 2024.
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