After defeating the caliph Muhammad al-Nasir in the battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the Castilian king, Alfonso VIII, donated to the monastery of Las Huelgas Reales de Burgos a curious spoil of war: a large silk tapestry with geometric and calligraphic motifs in red, yellow, green, blue, white, and black. Although this piece has traditionally been considered a banner (i.e., a flag), studies suggest it probably served as a canopy in the tent of the defeated commander. A couple of years after the battle, King Alfonso was buried in the church of the same monastery.
This tapestry, and the quilt in which Alfonso’s corpse was wrapped before burial, are the two textile elements that have served Teresa Lanceta as sources for her exhibition La cólcedra al filo del alba (La Cólcedra at the Break of Dawn—cólcedra being an archaism for quilt). The show was a sequel to “El sueño de la cólcedra” (The Dream of La Cólcedra), a project Lanceta presented in 2024 at the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, Spain, curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa. While the first exhibition spread across the museum’s huge Renaissance chapel, its continuation was piled up in the small space of the 1 Mira Madrid gallery, generating a feeling of accumulation and folding that forced a rereading of the pieces, arranged now as in a warehouse or in a fabric shop.
In addition to the pieces that take their geometric and chromatic cues from the banner and the shroud of King Alfonso, the exhibition included drawings based on the boards that adorn a thirteenth-century funerary monument and textile pieces that reproduce the motifs of their figures’ clothing. The series “Crónica de Una Batalla” (Chronicle of a Battle), 2023, for instance, represents mutilated limbs, recalling Goya’s “Disasters of War.” In other pieces, the artist forces an amalgamation of time, as if reaching for an archetype whose sufferings are the same yesterday, today, and forever. The most obvious example of this could be found in works from the “Bordados Cristianos” (Christian Embroideries) series, 2023, which are individually named after medieval noblewomen (at the time, embroidery was a typical domestic occupation for aristocratic women). Here, the artist put into their mouths verses (in Spanish) by modern poets, e.g., “What will I do with fear?” by Alejandra Pizarnik or “Let your heart devour” by Sandra Santana. The visitor read them as if prying into private messages. The exhibition also included a mountain of balls of dyed wool, as a physical confirmation of the volume that the raw material occupies before being woven into a flat warp.
Lanceta manages to reveal the countless cracks in nationalist accounts of these historical events—contradictions manifested in facts as eloquent as the role of a Catholic monastery in preserving for so many centuries and with so much care a banner (if that’s what it is) full of praises to Allah and His Prophet. It’s surprising how these works, although tied to very concrete historical anecdotes, have such contemporary resonance. It is strange to be interested in the problems of a medieval noblewoman, but even stranger to discover that some of these same concerns are our own.
