Paola Torres Núñez del Prado presents two new works at the Borås Art Biennial 2026. The works at the Textile Museum of Sweden continue her ongoing experimentation with materials, traditional techniques, machine learning and sound, drawing on Andean textile knowledge systems.

The sculptural installation Weaving Gardens (Deconstruction I) (2026) consists of a disassembled traditional Swedish loom and an interactive textile woven on it using lichens and moss. The living textile is lightly watered throughout the exhibition and the changing humidity is registered in sound, emanating from the moss itself. Moss has been used across cultures for millennia for its water-absorbing properties, its uses ranging from bedding to building insulation. Lichen (Usnea), meanwhile, is a significant indicator of air quality which is rapidly disappearing from polluted environments. Both are ancient pioneer species that make bare rock surfaces inhabitable for other forms of life. The interactive, more-than-human quality of the work relies on these organisms being kept alive. The lichens and moss will be returned to the forest after the exhibition.

The new moving image work Aw(as)qa (2026) builds on the artist’s long-term research into Andean textiles and the woven patterns that have traditionally been connected to songs and stories. Awasqa means “woven” in Quechua. In turn, Awqa means “adversary” (or “warrior”) and it signals the opposite of the woven pattern. Using machine learning, she has programmed an algorithm that produces ceaselessly evolving patterns based on traditional textile examples. Both works challenge the Western idea of linear time and progress, whereby older technologies are deemed inferior to the new ones.

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (born 1979 in Lima, Peru; lives in Stockholm, Sweden) is an artist and researcher working at the intersections of art, craft, science, and technology. Her practice explores non-Western histories and lineages of computation, and asks how we might imagine alternative technological futures.