Ana Teresa Barboza (b. 1981) is a Peruvian artist who works in the mediums of spatial installation, textile art and photography.
Originally a painter, Barboza now devotes herself to creating art out of natural fibres, a craft she mastered by working with artisans who preserve traditional techniques in her native Peru.
Barboza treats natural materials as archives that contain both human and other-than-human narratives and histories. The indigenous peoples of Peru have a long history of crafting plant fibres. Through this shared history, plants and people have mutually influenced one another’s evolution.
Barboza’s art brings to light the parallel histories of humans, nature and plant life. She uses natural fibres not only for their environmental sustainability, but also as a tribute to millennia-old handcrafting traditions.
Photo: Martin Seck
Ana Teresa Barboza: Interwoven Stories, 2025, detail. Helsinki Biennial 8.6.–21.9.2025, Vallisaari Island. Photo: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Sonja Hyytiäinen
Interwoven Stories, 2025
Artwork location: Vallisaari Island
The Indigenous peoples and communities of Amazonia have a long history of crafting plant fibres such as the bark of the yanchama tree. The vigorously pounded bark is used for making household utensils, ritual costumes, clothing, jewellery and parchment for inscriptions and paintings. Its Nordic counterpart is birchbark, which has a similar long history as a versatile crafting material. Barboza’s installation in Vallisaari’s Alexander Battery weaves together two parallel histories and cultures through the trope of tree bark.
Interwoven Stories takes us on a journey from northern forests to distant jungles, inviting us to reflect on similarities between these two divergent environments and their nonhuman and human inhabitants. Fragments of history are preserved in the natural fibres used by human cultures and communities.
Through our entwined histories, plants and humans have reciprocally shaped one another’s narratives as long-standing travel companions. Whether our culture has evolved in a Finnish birch forest or an Amazonian rainforest, human lives are invariably dependent on the resources gifted by nature.
Evoking a forest or landscape, Interwoven Stories is an installation of towering trees woven from birch and yanchama bark. Collaborating with the Mariche family, local artisans from Puerto Maldonado in Madre de Dios, who extracted the yanchama fibre, Barboza has filled the cores of the tree trunks with drawn narratives illustrating the culture and history of the birch and yanchama trees.
The artwork production is supported by the Saastamoinen Foundation.