The Sábana Santa de Tromsø is a seemingly white 60 x 300 cm fabric that was sent inside a shoebox to the Office for Political Innovation headquarters in Madrid by the architect Annike Romuld. The idea was launched a few years earlier during a boring designers meeting in Oslo. The deal established that the Office for Political Innovation would be in charge of making architectural actions using the content of the shoebox with the aim of defining experimentally what could be conceived as an architectural action at that moment.

A detailed study of the packaging could reconstruct the trajectory of the shipping by analyzing the marks on the wrapping paper (stamps, postmarks, customs marks, etc.). The fabric was studied in the same way. The Office for Political Innovation scrutinized it inch by inch, covering all the surface with a thread-counter and extracting some samples to be analyzed in a lab. When the survey was done, the fabric was not as white as it seemed. It had become a space where all the agents and actions in contact with the fabric were represented, a space where a series of social insertions emerged as visible phenomena.

All detected actions were registered in the fabric with embroidery. The fabric, thanks to the mediation of the embroidery, become then a critical device equipped to promote its own scrutiny. And it is in-between the white fabric and its envelope, in the tension generated between them, where one can find the arguments that make the design a passing point in the process of reconstructing societies.