Chuquimamani-Condori
Across the Policed World: A Transnocturnal Huayño
“From the darkness of eternal night, weaving twilight, weaving red through the heat of their voices
They say the ancestors were dancing, singing:
Desnudito, never let the light come / Desnudito, never let the day arrive
Because they knew the approaching sunrise brought the mundo en policía (policed world)”
–Aymara oral history
The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is pleased to present Across the Policed World: A Transnocturnal Huayño, an exhibition by multidisciplinary artist and musician Chuquimamani-Condori.
The exhibition builds a historical foundation for the first commissioned moving-image work by Chuquimamani-Condori and her brother Joshua Chuquimia Crampton.
Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter was shot mostly on 8mm film, with original animation, and a score composed and performed by Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. The film enacts a ceremony for the artists’ late grandmother, Flora Tancara Quiñonez Chuquimia and details the event in stories from the artists’ family that compose part of the Aymara community, a group of indigenous nations whose territories overlap with Bolivia, Chile and Peru, and whose people live today across the globe, maintaining relations through land ties and ceremony.
With a sound installation and archival photography, the exhibition invites visitors to enter the intimate atmosphere of ceremony, providing an introduction to the film, and attesting to a longer history of ceremony across the artist’s family or wila masinaka, blood friends.
In a collage-like assemblage, the film weaves archival audio and visual recordings interlaced with brief, personal stories from the artists’ great-grandparents and grandparents who fought for native education and the abolition of the Hacienda institution in the 1950s, a large system of landholdings sustained by the Bolivian Republic, under which Aymara people were enslaved for agricultural labor.
Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter opens a series of multiple beginnings, that together hint at an experience of the nonlinearity of time known in Aymaran as qhipnayra, in which the past is faced “ahead” and the future lies “behind”. The scenes of the film show Flora met by a dog, a condor and a hummingbird, central figures in the three-year transition to death, detailing Aymaran oral traditions.
Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter is commissioned by Auto Italia and produced by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Auto Italia (London), Haus der Kunst (Munich) and Arsenic – Centre d’art scénique contemporain (Lausanne). The film was premiered simultaneously in London and Munich. In Geneva, it is presented for the first time as part of a larger three-room installation by Chuquimamani-Condori. Across the Policed World: A Transnocturnal Huayño is curated by Andrea Bellini. The artist will present a talk on the night of the opening, on Friday March 4 at 8pm.
Chuquimamani-Condori is a multidisciplinary artist and musician belonging to the Pakaxa-Aymara nation. She has released multiple critically acclaimed records, including her most recent LP ORCORARA 2010 (2020) released on cutting-edge label PAN. Originally debuted at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2018, it interweaves acoustic guitars, droning synthesizers, piano, the spoken word, and guest singers.
Recent presentations have been given at Abrons Art Center, New York City (2021); The Vinyl Factory (2020); Biennale of the Moving Image at Centre D’Art Contemporain Genève (2018); Berghain, Berlin (2018); 6th Berlin Biennale (2016). Her first book Amarupachankiri was published earlier this year with Puro Fantasia.
