Anlly Carolina Estrada Muñoz was raised in a family who owned a small weaving workshop, therefore, since she was a child weaving was part of her life. While she was a student of the School of Fine Arts, she came to know the work of Teodoro Ramirez, a craftsman of retablos (Peruvian folk art miniature boxes that depict historical, religious and everyday events). Folk craftmanship in Perú is still a traditionalist practice which does not allow space for experimentation on critical social topics neither in the use of heterogeneous materials. In contrast, Ramirez’ refined retablos expressed the social violence of Ayacucho (the epicentre of the armed internal conflict in Peru) and were built whit unpretentious materials.
    Carolina started to manufacture costumes that put into dialogue old Andean languages, legacy colonial techniques and contemporary social imaginaries. She is interested in depicting what could be called a “republican weaving style”: a juxtaposition of symbols from Peru’s history represent through a diversity of weaving techniques but also in connection with the fabric’s commercial itineraries: from pre-Columbian, to colonial and even Arabic weaving practices. The artist also likes to juxtapose the two cultures that concurred in the migration from the Andes to the city of Lima by designing matts made out of Junco (used to build the shelters of Lima’s shanty towns where immigrant settled) with colonial brocade.
    Due to its malleability, textiles allow her new ways of making installations, interventions or objects that act as cultural and social mediators between people, evincing their constitutive urban-social “fabric”. Her aim is to understand how weaving is used both as a visual and tactile language for the depiction of symbols that allows people to identify new concepts for the idea of nation and thus, can act as powerful social mediators.