Amnesia is the first show of the KVA Collection. For three days, KVA's offices become an exhibition space for Maca Cerquera, whose drawings, embroidery, and ceramics ask what remains of us when memory begins to slip.
For three days, KVA's offices become an exhibition space. Amnesia is the first show of the KVA Collection — a permanent cultural program that sits at the center of what we do, not at the edges of it.
Maca Cerquera works with drawing, embroidery, and ceramics to ask what remains of us when memory begins to slip. Her answer is not an archive. It is a labyrinth.
Amnesia is an investigation into memory as a thin, mutable thread — one that wears away over time, yet continues to bind us to who we are.
The exhibition brings together a previously unseen body of work by Maca Cerquera, a visual artist originally from Lima whose practice holds remembrance and loss, permanence and dissolution, in constant tension. Amnesia does not propose an inventory of forgotten things. It proposes a sensory experience: each work is a fragment that holds on and lets go at once, restoring memory to its fragile, enigmatic dimension.
"Memory is not merely a repository of recollections, but a way of being in the world." — Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Memory here reveals its duality: weight and lightness, bond and liberation. Cerquera's works invite us to see oblivion not as absence, but as the possibility of beginning again.
Postcards for my Boyfriend — A series of drawings and embroidered works born from a real relationship across three countries — Japan, Thailand, Argentina — and the fall of 2023. Each piece is a postcard sent from the past: affective testimony of shared experiences and unspoken silences. The series questions what we hold onto, and what we allow ourselves to lose.
Sometimes Is More Than Whole — Cerquera enters the sculptural dimension for the first time. These ceramic and mixed-media works meditate on the cycle of matter: how it grows, transforms, shatters, and recomposes into new form. The title holds a quiet truth — sometimes a fragment contains more than the whole; sometimes incompleteness is its own kind of arrival.
Tapestries — Three large-scale hand-embroidered tapestries, each made over months, each existing only once. The works are shown alongside video documentation of their making — the needle, the thread, the accumulated hours. What embroidery shares with memory: it is irreversible, it is slow, and it lasts.
Amnesia series — marker and colored pencils on organic paper, 2025
Amnesia extends beyond the physical walls of KVA. Each room has a QR code that opens an interactive map of the show and a dedicated AI — built on interviews, artworks, and materials shared by Maca Cerquera herself.
This is not a simulation of the artist. It is a living catalog: a way to explore her work, her process, and her thinking — through conversation.
Scan. Explore. Ask. — kakashi.ventures/art/maca-cerquera
Maca Cerquera was born in Lima in 1990 and has lived and worked in Cusco since 2021. She studied architecture in Buenos Aires — where she lived for seven years — and took art courses at Universidad Di Tella and the National University of the Arts. In 2014, in São Paulo, she learned to embroider. The technique has been central to her practice ever since.
She works across drawing, embroidery, ceramics, visual poetry, and photography. Her practice centers on the act of collecting: memories, invented landscapes, and recollections that, through layering and repetition, accumulate into stories.
She has participated in group exhibitions in Lima and across Europe, including Des/pro/tejidas at the Centro Cultural de España in Lima, Galleria Lastcrit in Barcelona, and Essere in Turin.
KVA — Kakashi Venture Accelerator is Turin's first AI-native venture studio. The KVA Collection is a permanent cultural program within our operational space — a commitment to bringing culture into the place where we work. It includes a curated selection of artworks and recommended books, chosen by us. For Amnesia, the selection goes further: Maca Cerquera has contributed her own reading list, in direct dialog with the exhibition. We build companies. We also create space for observation.
"Even in the era of thinking machines, it will all be around human imagination." — Federico Bottino, KVA
