Prueba y Error in Crisis gallery, Lima

For over a decade, Matin has cultivated and collaborated with a network of approximately 200 artisans across Cajamarca, Huancavelica, Puerto Maldonado, Arequipa, and Lima to create her designs. Over the years she has built a singular archive of textile knowledge that includes her extensive collection of swatches, where her distinctive aesthetic meets traditional and contemporary techniques—from crochet, loom weaving, macramé, and manual machine to industrial machine, intarsia, and jacquard. For this exhibition, Matin transforms these procedural fragments—originally created as tests for her eponymous clothing label—into patchwork compositions. Grouped by color, these textile works are more than a mere presentation of technical variations; they embody living relationships between makers, materials, territory, and tradition. Each work in the series, titled Las estaciones terminan, serves as a repository of multiple temporalities: the hours invested in creation, the enduring rhythms of collaborative relationships, the “deep time” of accumulated generational knowledge, and the seeds of works yet to come. Matin reconfigures these temporal layers, creating new arrangements and encounters, in the process presenting a haptic history of embodied knowledge.

Sergio Murga Rossel’s ceramic compositions similarly embrace multiple temporal registers and an understanding of assemblage as a form of gathering, translation, and transformation. Trained as a painter before turning to ceramics, Murga Rossel is known for his tableware for restaurants such as Central, Maido and Mérito, where he has explored the vessel as a site for responding to fundamental questions about the relationship between food, body, and space. In this exhibition, Murga Rossel breaks free from utilitarian constraints to embrace precarity, overflow and fracture as aesthetic motivations. In these works he stacks fragments from seven years of tests and experiments into precarious vertical structures that incorporate kiln shelves typically used as functional supports during firing. Other works center broken vessels and glazes layered to transform color into form. These assemblages blur the boundaries between process and finished work, revealing both the unpredictable nature of material experimentation and the often-invisible structures that support such practices.

Prueba y error invites us to understand making as a form of world-building, where each fragment contains tactile histories of materials and processes deeply embedded in networks of meaning, memory, and social relations. Matin y Murga Rossel re-enchant their respective genealogies of making to demonstrate how an archive of process can remain vital and generative, revealing what Tsing calls “potential histories in the making.” Their assemblages reframe trial and error not as a simple opposition between failure and success, but as a way of materializing knowledge-making in its collective form.

Susie Quillinan