Kenia Almaraz Murillo’s Tapestries Illuminate Threads of Her Bolivian Heritage
Portrait of Kenia Almarez Murillo in her studio. Photo by Benjamin McMahon. Courtesy of Waddington Custot.
When Kenia Almaraz Murillo first arrived in Paris in 2005 at age 11, it was late December and the City of Light beamed through a soft blanket of snow. It’s a memory that the Bolivian artist recalls with fondness. “I had never seen snow before and was completely in awe. It felt so far from home,” she told Artsy as she prepared for her current exhibition at Waddington Custot in London. This formative experience with snow was what prompted the sculptural integration of LED lights into the tapestry works in her practice, which are on view in the show, “Andean Cosmovision,” through January 30th.
After her unsettling relocation to Paris from Bolivia that separated the artist from her parents, Almaraz Murillo gradually adapted to a new world. Instead of open landscapes, she now navigated narrow cobbled streets illuminated by headlights.
Kenia Almarez Murillo, detail of El Lagarto, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Waddington Custot.
Almaraz Murillo captures the polarity of these lived experiences in her alchemic wall hangings, which abound with personal associations of home, and serve as stores of collective memory and family heritage. Into tapestries woven with Indigenous South American yarns sourced from her mother’s village of Aquechata and antique Parisian gold threads, the artist integrates urban artifacts: car reflectors, motorbike headlamps, and kitsch trinkets foraged from scrap yards and markets.
“In Bolivia we often say ‘la sangre llama,’ meaning ‘the blood calls,’” Almaraz Murillo said. “For me, the instinct of the thread has allowed me to reconnect with an ancestral and familial line of weavers, bringing it into dialogue with my contemporary experiences of Paris.”
Interior view of Kenia Almarez Murillo’s studio. Photo by Benjamin McMahon. Courtesy of Waddington Custot.
Earlier this month, when Artsy visited Almaraz Murillo at her studio in an artistic community building in the arrondissement of Saint-Denis, she recalled her first return to Bolivia. “Every time I return I feel as an archaeologist might: excavating and observing moments past and present,” the artist said. “Each encounter is a true discovery. Whether that be the quiet rolling mountains of Altiplano, the beauty of the llamas calmly returning to the sheepfold, or the intense crack of a storm breaking on the earth.”
Some 15 years later, Almaraz Murillo is still attempting to capture this sense of wonder. Her new body of work for the Waddington Custot show is perhaps her most personal to date, developed after her most recent trip to western Bolivia. During her time there, she spoke with family members and neighbors about local legends passed down through generations.
Portrait of Kenia Almarez Murillo in her studio. Photo by Benjamin McMahon. Courtesy of Waddington Custot.
Her response to these newly encountered stories is a set of large wall-based sculptures. “I really wanted to preserve the sensation of revelation in these pieces,” the artist said. “I arrived at the loom with the same wonder I felt when I first discovered the myths and urban legends of my ancestors—a gift I felt compelled to pass on, just as it was passed down to me.”
In the weaving Ekeko (2024), white LED strips illuminate an altar of offerings: little bags of sugar, rice, and candy as well as rolls of banknotes and figurines cast in resin that sit on shelves affixed to the fabric. Across the Andean area of Bolivia, every year, on January 24th, similar objects are taken to be blessed by local shamans in a ceremony known as La Fiesta de Alasitas. “During the celebration, the entire city of La Paz is filled with thousands of miniatures, signifiers of what an individual wants to enter their lives in the coming months,” said Almaraz Murillo. “I grew up admiring this energy of abundance and I dreamed of one day honoring it.”
Almaraz Murillo is deeply inspired by the traditional geometric writing of her grandmothers’ aguayos: boldly patterned hand-woven cloths imbued with motifs of Indigenous Andean cosmology and collective identity. With the weaving El Katari que se extravió (2024), for example, she conjures the community legend of katari, a mythical mountain snake that, by lying across the horizon, defined the mountainous geology of her family’s region.
Creatures of pre-Columbian folk tales—ants, lizards, and condors—appear liberated from any linear narrative throughout “Andean Cosmovision.” In the piece Los Urus (2024), they take form in the elaborately embroidered insignias of costumes worn by dancers in the Carnival of Oruro. For the artist, who is also a member of a traditional Bolivian dance ensemble in Paris, continuity of tradition is a profound responsibility and privilege.
“To wear and make art with these costumes is an honor that must be earned,” she told Artsy. “They hold the knowledge of our ancestors, the stories of our communities, and the history of our country. When we dance in these garments, woven with history, every step carries the echoes of our past and honors the spirits that live in our traditions.”
