Andrea Peña & Bárbara Sánchez-Kane on Body, Design and Performance

A Refined Overview

• CHANEL Connects brought together CHANEL Next Prize winners choreographer Andrea Peña and artist-designer Bárbara Sánchez-Kane at the Venice Biennale, in conversation with Yana Peel.
• Peña’s practice spans dance and industrial design; she describes scenography not as decoration but as something that “activates ideas” and frames the body as a site of negotiation.
• Sánchez-Kane studied engineering before turning to garment-making, describing her designs as “an architect of failure” — objects that produce unexpected mediations between people.
• Latin American maximalism, described by Peña as “sacred chaos,” is central to both artists’ approaches, from Bogotá’s Andean Baroque churches to São Paulo’s rehearsal culture.
• Both artists identified uncertainty, contradiction, and the refusal to “fix” things as core creative values, with Sánchez-Kane’s work Patria — first presented in Mexico City in 2021 — exemplifying this through its deconstruction of military uniform and bodily identity.

A Conversation Shaped by Venice

The Venice Biennale has long provided a frame for conversations that cross disciplinary lines, and CHANEL Connects used that context deliberately for its 2026 edition. Yana Peel moderated a 25-minute exchange that drew out the conceptual overlaps between Peña’s choreographic practice and Sánchez-Kane’s approach to garment and object-making. The two had collaborated previously — Sánchez-Kane made costumes for Peña’s dance work presented at the Dance Biennale in 2023 — yet this was their first in-person meeting, a fact that gave the conversation an immediate, unguarded quality. For an audience that included students and fellows, the candour around professional vulnerability and financial pressure felt particularly useful.

The CHANEL Next Prize, which supports both artists, operates in the space where creative practice and institutional backing intersect. That context matters: the conversation was not simply about artistic philosophy but about the infrastructure required to sustain it — companies, galleries, commissions, and the administrative weight that comes with leading a team of up to 20 performers.

Andrea Peña: Choreography as Design Thinking

Peña trained in ballet at American Ballet Theatre before completing both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in design — a combination she credits with fundamentally reshaping how she approaches movement. Rather than seeing choreography as the arrangement of dance steps, she frames it closer to spatial design: scenography, in her practice, is not there to decorate a stage but to activate a negotiation between performers and the built environment. The chair a performer sits in, she argues, choreographs the body just as much as any movement score does.

Her company, founded ten years ago, has developed what she describes as queer, inclusive and decolonial values embedded into the company’s administrative structure, not only its artistic output. The work presented at the Biennale drew on Bogotá’s Andean Baroque — small, maximalist gold churches where indigenous builders infused colonial architecture with their own symbols — as a way of staging postcolonial questions about identity and imagination. Currently working with the ballet in São Paulo, Peña spoke about the warmth of Latin American rehearsal culture and the concept of “sacred chaos” as a genuinely productive creative condition, not a problem to be managed.

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane: The Architecture of Failure

Sánchez-Kane’s route into making was through engineering, and that training is visible in how she talks about garments: not as finished products but as objects whose meaning shifts depending on who carries or wears them. A coat with so many pockets that the wearer loses their phone, she suggests, is doing something more interesting than keeping someone warm — it is producing a small disruption in the owner’s habitual relationship to their belongings. The phrase she uses, “architect of failure,” points to a design philosophy that values productive malfunction over resolved form.

Her installation Patria, first shown in Mexico City in 2021, placed three soldiers in a state of penetration — not as a literal image of violence but as a question about what a military uniform conceals and what it erases of the individual body beneath it. Presented later at the Arsenal during the Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the work ran without a rehearsal in the full space, meaning each performance differed, with audiences sometimes only hearing the footsteps and trumpets rather than watching directly. That uncontrolled reception is, for Sánchez-Kane, part of the work’s meaning rather than a limitation. Her recent pieces shown alongside fellow CHANEL Next Prize winner Álvaro Urbano at the Hum collection in Mexico City continued this investigation into when and how a garment crosses into art.

Why It Matters

For collectors and cultural audiences across the GCC, where CHANEL maintains a strong presence and where interest in cross-disciplinary luxury programming continues to grow, this edition of CHANEL Connects offers a substantive model of how a fashion house can anchor cultural conversation beyond product. The dialogue between Peña and Sánchez-Kane — rooted in Latin American experience but addressing universal questions about the body, technology, and creative uncertainty — speaks to an increasingly global collector mindset. Watch the full exchange in the CHANEL Connects official film for the complete conversation.

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