Juana Montoya

Juana Montoya is a textile and clothing designer, researcher and cultural producer. She was born in El Mollar, a village in Tafí del Valle, in the interior of Tucumán province in north-western Argentina. It is a mountainous region where a close relationship with materials, craft and ways of making shapes how she sees and creates.

Her practice grows from this connection to place, as well as from a concern for what happens when knowledge is no longer passed on. In many contexts, craftspeople, cultural practitioners and keepers of knowledge are facing the loss of traditions once shared from one generation to the next. When that transmission is interrupted, it is not only a technique that disappears: the memories, relationships, livelihoods and possibilities for change that surround it are weakened too.

In response, Montoya works to create the conditions for this knowledge to remain in motion. She does not seek to preserve it as something frozen in time, but to open up dialogue between those who hold this knowledge and new generations; between craft and design; between material and contemporary life.

Her practice brings together design, research, curatorial work and production, in collaboration with independent craftspeople. Through individual pieces, collections and collaborative projects, she explores how what we inherit can take on new forms without losing the traces of where it came from.

In Madrid- Casa De barde , she presented a selection of singular pieces under the theme Material · Craft · Time · Perspective, arranged in three groupings: Tránsitos, Remanencia and Entrecruces. The exhibition invites us to consider materials and crafts as living processes: what moves, what endures and what changes when knowledge encounters new perspectives.

For Montoya, designing is also a way of carrying things forward: allowing what already exists to keep finding new forms of existence.