Prescribing Space, Thinking Through the Body: The Philosophy of “Play” in Andrea Canepa’s Art

In the art world, the concept of “play” is frequently reduced to childhood, lightness, or a particular entertainment. Yet for Peruvian-born artist Andrea Canepa, play is the most concrete, most radical form of “bodily knowledge” established with material, space, and historical memory. In Canepa’s works, touching an object, weighing it, bending down, passing under it, or getting caught up in its rhythm reminds us that knowledge is obtained not filtered through the mind, but through muscles and bones.

Her projects meeting the audience simultaneously in museum and gallery spaces across Spain—the Palacio de Cristal intervention Fardo in Madrid, Salto, giro, cadencia, trance at Galería Crisis, and Entre lo profundo y lo distante at IVAM—represent the most mature phase in which Canepa transforms the concept of play into a cultural resistance and a spatial ritual.

Memory Hidden in Layers of Fabric: Fardo at Palacio de Cristal

Wrapping the iconic structure of Retiro Park in Madrid, Palacio de Cristal, with massive layers of fabric, the Fardo project is shaped around the concepts of protection, concealment, and transformation. Taking its inspiration from Peru’s ancient Paracas funerary bundles (fardo) and the praxinoscope, considered the ancestor of cinema, the installation transforms the viewer from a mechanical spectator into a moving subject.

While social media “reels” in today’s digital world trap the image in an infinite and mechanical loop, Fardo makes the logic of the image visible only through the distance the viewer covers in the space with their own body. Covering the colonial-era architecture composed of glass and iron with layered textiles, this intervention grants the body making contact with architecture the freedom to determine its own time and rhythm.

A Sacred Spinning Top and an Anti-Colonial Turn: Salto, giro, cadencia, trance

Taking place at Galería Crisis, Salto, giro, cadencia, trance takes its departure point from the imaginary spinning top zumbayllu in José María Arguedas’s novel Los ríos profundos. Beyond being an ordinary toy in the Andean worldview, the spinning top is an instrument communicating with sound, movement, desire, and invisible forces; in Canepa’s hands, it transforms into a symbol of spinning, swaying, and standing tall despite the danger of falling.

Bearing traces of the 16th-century Andean anti-colonial resistance movement Taki Onqoy, costume parts of traditional danzaq dancers sway in the space without human bodies in the exhibition. While Canepa endows movement and rhythm with a spatial presence without a human subject, she conceives the spinning top’s survival by spinning continuously on the brink of falling as the transformation of a fragile balance into a resilient insistence.

Suspending Hierarchies and the Memory of Material

In her works such as Entre lo profundo y lo distante exhibited at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) and Wasi Llamkha (Lugar y tacto) at Condeduque, Canepa confronts the Western-centric perspective focused on the horizon line with the Andean culture’s perspective focused on the soil, the deep, and being within. However, this encounter is not a struggle for superiority; it is an effort to create a ground where hierarchies are suspended and different forms of knowledge touch without swallowing each other.

For Canepa, material is not merely a passive tool serving to convey an idea. Material has its own resistance, warmth, fragility, and memory. While constructing wooden, woven, resin, or metallic forms, the artist demands that the viewer not merely look, but negotiate with the work by bending down, touching, and feeling its weight.

Learning the Rules, Seeping Through the Cracks

Aware that art is a “playground” woven with institutional, economic, and spatial rules, Canepa accepts the impossibility of stepping outside these rules while refusing to surrender the game board entirely. For the artist, actual production comes from recognizing the rules and finding small cracks through which to move between them.

Deviating slightly from the mold of a flawless professional artist who meets expectations completely—allowing oneself to make mistakes, stray from the path, and not fit neatly into molds—is the most liberating point in Canepa’s practice where the work itself begins.

Andrea Canepa is one of the most original contemporary voices transforming the viewer from a passive observer to directly confronting the physicality of space and material. Rather than rejecting the rules of the game, Canepa’s productions—which allow us to test the elasticity of those rules with our bodies—prove that our muscles and bones remember just as much as our minds.