The Museo de América, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, has unveiled 'Dancing Threads', an audiovisual piece by renowned artist Eva Lootz, which will be on display until 14 March. This work represents the conclusion of the 'Memory, textiles, museums: The underbelly of attention' project, launched by the Ministry in 2025.
The initiative involved collaborations with contemporary artists linked to textile production, who were invited to study and reinterpret collections from five state museums. Interventions have been presented at the Museo de América, the Museum of Costume and Research Centre for Ethnological Heritage, the National Museum of Romanticism, the National Museum of Decorative Arts, and the National Archaeological Museum.
Curated by Selina Blasco and Patricia Molins, the project examines the historical significance of textiles within decorative and industrial arts, challenging the traditional separation between material culture and art. It advocates for textiles as a medium of considerable formal and conceptual complexity, capable of raising creative, technical, perceptual, anthropological, curatorial, authorship, and gender-related questions.
'Dancing Threads', created by Eva Lootz in collaboration with dancer and embroiderer Kike García Gil and artist Hildy Quintanilla, begins with the thread—an essential element of weaving—to explore the connections between various fields of knowledge and to champion manual skills, particularly in textiles, which have historically been regarded as lesser practices compared to fine art.
A central theme of 'Dancing Threads' is the relationship between weaving, imagery, body, and dance. Following her research on endangered languages in Latin America, Lootz has focused on the linguistic codes present in pre-Columbian textiles that survived Spanish influence, investigating the various ways to name materials, techniques, and meanings linked to the textile universe of an indigenous Andean culture, in collaboration with Quechua artist Hildy Quintanilla. This approach allows her to engage with alternative forms of knowledge and worldviews where concepts such as mutual nurturing gain particular significance.
The proposal also expands its perspective to the history of thread and weaving, tracing their connections to writing and the enduring power of images, as well as the historical ties between thread, femininity, and collectivity. Through this exhibition at the Museo de América, the 'Memory, textiles, museums' project completes a journey across five state museums, featuring interventions by artists who approach textiles from various perspectives: their materiality, symbolic and anthropological dimensions, and their role as an expressive medium.
About Eva Lootz
Eva Emma Lootz Pater was born in Vienna in 1940, where she studied film direction. She moved to Spain in the 1960s, coinciding with the rise of conceptual art. Her first exhibition took place in 1973, where she showcased painting alongside canvas objectives and textiles, a spatial and three-dimensional turn that became prominent in her work from the late 1970s onwards.
Some of her notable exhibitions include 'Metal' (Madrid, 1983), 'Night, they said' (Barcelona, 1987), 'Written Carpet' (Amsterdam, 1990), 'A Farewell to Isaac Newton' (London, 1994), 'The Mother Stirs' (Valencia, 1997), 'Ich und Du' (Cologne, 2000), 'Drifts' (Porto, 2001), 'The Language of Birds' (Madrid, 2002), 'World, Dry, Benamor, Bitter' (Murcia, 2009), 'Water Journeys' (Madrid, 2009), 'The Song of Earth' (Madrid, 2016), 'The Reverse of Monuments and the Agony of Languages' (Valladolid, 2020), 'To Act as If: What Is This?' (Madrid, 2024), 'If You Still Want to See Something...' (Madrid, 2024), 'Eva Lootz' (Basel, 2025), and 'I Have It on the Tip of My Tongue' (Palma de Mallorca, 2026).
Her artistic contributions have been recognised with numerous awards, including the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1994), the Tomás Francisco Prieto Prize from the Royal Mint (2009), the MAV Award for Women in Visual Arts (2010), and the Plastic Arts Award from the Community of Madrid (2022).
