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Artist interview: Crossing borders with Andean artist Claudia Martínez Garay
We sit down with Claudia Martínez Garay to discuss the inspiration for her artwork and her current exhibition at the GRIMM Gallery in London...
January 15, 2025
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Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
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The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
Your heritage inspires your practice, referencing historical images, sounds, and symbols specific to your ‘home country’ of Peru and shared with other Andean countries, including modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. You also use these objects to interrogate European museum collections and histories and live and work between Amsterdam and Lima, Peru. How important is this movement, and crossing borders, to your practice?
I come from Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was born during that time when there was an armed conflict between Shining Path and the state. There was a lot of forced displacement, people migrating because of the war, and that's how I ended up in Lima and was brought up there. So, I was unable to continue the tradition of my own Indigenous community. My adoptive family in Lima also come from the mountainous part but from the north, Ancash. I've embraced their culture as part of my own, and I was brought up in the capital of Lima, a predominantly criollo [of Spanish descent] and white city. That's why I could study art at a university level, as there are very few schools for art. The basis of my art, work, or life is asking where I come from, what happened there before my time, how I could have lived there, and how similar or different my life would have been from the many communities there. It’s like I have a parallel life that I didn’t live but also live in my head. That connection is very important to me, and I’m eager to know more about this, especially regarding the social and cultural aspects.
I went to the Netherlands around seven years ago to do an artist residency. Before then, I was immersed in and obsessed with working and researching propaganda in Peru. How it is managed between the official and unofficial, between the state, civilian population and Shining Path, and the representation of the brown, Indigenous bodies, who were the most affected by these two forces. When I was abroad in Amsterdam, my work changed. Lima is a very racist city towards migrants from the Sierra (mountain) region, where I come from. There is a significant stigma towards people from the Andes, or brown, Indigenous backgrounds, especially from Ayacucho; they label them as terrorists, communists, extreme leftists, and radicals. I felt freer when I was out of Lima, more able to explore and express my own Indigenous heritage because I didn't have that stigma of seeing myself as a threat just because of how I looked. And, of course, racism exists everywhere. I'm confronted every day in Europe that I'm not from there.
Your video animation Ayataki (2022-2023), on the effects of the 1980s civil conflict in Peru between the communist guerrilla group Shining Path and the military government, has been screened at Artpace in Texas, in your recent exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) in Scotland, and online. How has it been perceived by different audiences in different contexts?
I translate the work's full title as Song for the Dead. It was after the COVID pandemic that many people lost family members, and it was a very dark moment for me. I thought I never actually really mourned my original family, and I wanted to do a video that could be a lament, you know, that you can just feel and sense something through moving images and sound. Although the narration does not tell you specifically what it is about, you have this sense that something there is still latent and has devastated certain areas where no people are left.
The film is set amongst a reconstructed landscape, which connects to your work in site-specific installations; your most recent, at Nottingham Contemporary, also referenced the American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros. Ayataki’s soundscape combines the original music you wrote, samples from traditional songs from the Peruvian Andes, and footage from the 1970 documentary El terremoto de Áncash (The Ancash Earthquake). Can you talk about the role of audio in your work?
So there is this encounter between traditional folklore songs and older ones. At the beginning of the video, the first polyphonic music was created in Quechua, hanaq pachaq kusikuynin, specially used to colonise Andean people [by the Spanish Empire from the 16th century]. They tried to make an analogy between the Virgin Mary and heaven by mixing them with Andean cosmology and symbols. In Andean celebrations now, most of the time, you hear those Catholic songs.
The video uses some sound footage from the [1970 Ancash] earthquake in Peru, one of the hardest earthquakes in history. It's not related at all, but it contextualises this as a horrific event. Traumatic events accompany each other or make sense together in the narration.
I wanted the audience to feel this latent fear. In the end, you have all of these fireworks, usually when the celebrations end, like the climax of a sound composition. But still, you get the mournful sense that joyful and violent things coexist.
The film has little dialogue, some in Spanish and some in Quechua, a group of languages spoken by the Indigenous Quechua peoples of South America. A radio tower is constantly present, and architecture targeted during the war to limit communications within the country, which have since become symbols of the era. How much and how do communities of different cultures and languages in Peru communicate today?
Attacks on communication came often, on the towers as well as with car bombs. They are images and sorrowful memories that cannot be erased from Peruvians’ heads.
Even though we have three official languages, Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, Quechua is the most widely spread language. It's not actually practised as an official language by the powers of the capital. I'm relearning it, as it is my native tongue. Still, as children of migrants, you are actually encouraged not to speak it to not be discriminated [against], to assimilate and [be] accepted in the capital. That is totally shifting because people are much more informed and understanding of all the things that have been lost within their own family’s traditions.
My story is the same as millions of others. For example, we had one of the longest closing [lockdown] periods during the pandemic. It lasted almost two years, and the children didn't go to school. That can work easily in the capital, [where] they have their phones and the internet. But in the rural areas, you could see videos where they had to walk for hours trying to get some signal on the phone to listen to the radio to hear some of the lessons.
It was a completely different reality that the government didn't see through. And that's because the provinces are relegated from these rights to communication, education, and basic rights. For example, when people in Congress want to speak in Quechua, they laugh at them and don't let them speak because the majority of Congress people from the capital know English, French, anything and everything but not Quechua. This is just because of the very embedded racism that exists.
I think that also happens worldwide. I know I work with subjects that are local to me, about my country, and the stories and history of Peru, but I think the issues are shared in most of the [global] southern countries. I believe culture opens up the possibility to connect. These things that most people think are stupid or unnecessary, like food, cinema, and art, serve as a bridge for those who don't want to see anything outside the capital. This is the reason why culture is so important for humanity.
You first studied printmaking in Peru, and your artistic process of carving out, stencilling, and layering images is evident in your murals, installations, and free-standing sculptures. Your exhibition in Scotland included a production residency with DCA Print Studio, culminating in the works Intrusos En Sus Tierras (Intruders in their own lands) and Dueños de Sus Sombras (Owners of their shadows), now on view at GRIMM Gallery in London. How do these new commissions continue from your research?
Those works started from some small paintings that I did. I wanted them to feel or have this idea as if they came from educational books in Peru, which I had when I was younger and now collect. I worked with Katie, who was in charge of risography. We were both trying to see what kind of colour would match what I could remember seeing in my old school books.
Riso can be really mismatched and imprecise when the printing happens. I really love that. For me, it talks about precarity, but also, you don't need to have the perfect image to know or recognise something. In this case, the risograph allowed me to see those natural mismatches that are so beautiful in their nature.
Most of the time, in school books, you have the idea that this is what the world is like, and history is very fixed. That's why I'm very interested in them. Most of the images are very illustrative and synthesised. Dueños, for example, is like a grid [or codex].
It is important to highlight this different relationship with land, between white and brown bodies. For me, this clash of understanding is very important. It's like the people depicted are the owners of their own shadows only. Borrowed Air, the title of my current exhibition at GRIMM, also concerns this idea: no one is allowed to own anything. You are always made to feel like you are asking for permission for everything to exist in life, especially with racist people who think they have more rights over others. Air, nature, and living beings don’t belong to anyone.
The other work, translated as Intruders In Their Own Land, is a drawing that comes from the same series and forms an Andean cross together. But each of them, for me, was like a bit of note that I also have when reading, seeing, or thinking about something. One of those, for example, is the one where there’s a leather shoe stamping on a wooden flute.
That idea came when I read something by José María Arguedas, one of my favourite writers. What I love about his work is that he was in the middle between the brown and white worlds; he was a bridge. It's so sad [that] he committed suicide because he always had this sorrow of not being able to understand how Indigenous people could feel and be treated like equals. He wrote of the experiences of indigenous people as being in an enslaved mode. No one actually said directly that they were enslaved, but they were. So, in one scene, they were sleeping in the back part of the hacienda and playing their music, their huaynos [traditional songs], and then the patron came to shut them up and broke the instrument. And from that moment on, there was silence. For me, those words created an image, a breaking point, that struck me and stayed with me.
Another one is the condor, the biggest bird of prey in the Andes, putting their claws into the bull. This is a metaphor for the Andean world, towards and over the Spanish world. Bullfighting is a horrible celebration, but what it represents for me, in this case, is also essential. So it's like the white and brown entering into contact with each other, an encounter. Most of the time, it's violent, and since then, everything has changed. And, of course, I'm not saying we have to rewind history. What I'm saying is that all of those things have made us what we are, but their continuation needs to be discussed and problematised. Because people are still living those things.
Borrowed Air is on view at GRIMM Gallery in London until 22 February 2025.
Every seed is awakened was on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until 17 November 2024. Ayataki (2022-2023) was also screened online as part of the Frieze Film × ICA Artists’ Film Programme 2024, coinciding with Frieze London in October 2024.
