Mining the Qhapaq Ñan

MINING THE QHAPAQ ÑAN Micaela de Vivero

MINING THE QHAPAQ ÑAN An exhibition by Micaela de Vivero, Professor, Visual Arts, Denison University Denison Museum January 19 - April 1, 2024 Welcome to “Mining the Qhapaq Ñan,” an exhibition showcasing the profound and intricate work of Micaela de Vivero. As you enter this immersive space, be prepared to delve into the rich layers of Vivero’s artistic exploration, where scale, interactivity, and her ever-evolving perspective converge to create a thought-provoking experience. The installation, intentionally designed to be expansive, transforms the viewer’s sense of scale, fostering a feeling of insignificance that mirrors the vastness of the historical narratives embedded within the artwork.

Vivero’s creative strategies emphasize audience movement, allowing viewers to engage with the installation from various angles and witness the participatory work evolve in real time. Her art, like the landscapes she draws inspiration from, encourages contemplation as you navigate the space, your perspective changing dynamically and over time. The exhibition unfolds a narrative that spans continents, from Vivero’s upbringing in Quito, Ecuador, amidst historic cathedrals adorned with gold to her explorations of ancient cultures in places as distant as Greece and Peru. Central to this exhibition is Vivero’s deep dive into the history of silver and gold, connecting her work to the complexities of colonialization, mining, and extraction. With intentional research and a keen eye for historical nuances, she references and recontextualizes images, creating never-ending connections between past and present. The exhibition’s centerpiece, a large paperwork piece of the Peruvian city of Cusco, divides the location of the Inka Trail- north, south, east, and west, leading you on a journey revealing facets of South America’s intricate history.

Through this academic exploration, Vivero, a dedicated college educator and practicing artist, invites you to reflect on the continent’s history, encouraging connections to your own heritage and the contemporary world Megan Hancock Director and Curator, Denison Museum

1

Mining the Qhapaq Ñan

quest of Peru in the late-sixteenth-century. Vivero’s installation mines a complex web of interlacing historical, political, and cultural relations forged in the Andean past by Spanish greed for Andean gold and silver, and reflected today in the contemporary South American mining industry. But it also explores her own intersectional identity, the past-and-present cultural significance of mining precious metals in the Andes. And it even mines the concept of the western history: its title references artist Fred Wilson’s series of installations, beginning with Mining the Museum (1992/3, Maryland Historical Society) in which he revealed the inherent biases and double narratives promoted by national, colonial, and imperial museums as agents of ‘soft power’.

Micaela de Vivero was born in Munich, Germany but raised in Quito, Ecuador. She graduated from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and received an MFA from Alfred University in New York.

Joy Sperling, Professor Emerita, Art History & Visual Culture, Denison University

Micaela de Vivero’s art has a clarity of vision and meaning combined with an evocative beauty that is as breathtaking as it is historically and politically resonant.

It is direct and contained. Yet just below the exquisitely balanced surfaces of each piece, Vivero has tended and nurtured her objects and images to develop in each a rich, complex, intelligent, theoretically cogent, and deeply relevant rumination on identity, intersectionality, decoloniality, as well as on the past and the present of our complicated world. In her exhibition Mining the Qhapaq Ñan (Quechua for ‘Royal Road’), Micaela de Vivero has created an integrated installation that, as the exhibition title suggests, fundamentally undermines the theoretical possibility of a singularity of meaning in language, vision, or identity, while also engaging in a conversation across time with another Andean’s response to the Spanish con-

1 Qhapaq Ñan trek route Machu Picchu

Paso War?;':'J~usca B,

m.

#\/\,

..• #

~ Uulluchapa mpa

~

'411,

"'

~

'r,

~ .. ,

-J:; •

.._·

J-2.i.:'' ~-

··-.

... '

lOOOm./12467A

•

I•' .. '

P~~ ~u?,~!:~ay

I

-'<,

t

... -? --,_

-----

36S0m.

•{t!P'

a,~x

,

,<.,.

----'<1--

----·'

I

Wayllaba 3000m./9

~

Paso Phuyu/~~~;:i•rka

00 m/11

.... ;, ....

.

I

-

: P~:o m / 8924

---

,._, _____ ,...

2

from km 82 to

There is no quick or easy way to address the wreckage left by colonial powers, but recent LatinAmerican iterations of decoloniality, which inform Vivero’s art on many levels, posit that the only positive way to repair societies fundamentally damaged by colonialism in the ‘Global South’ is to ‘delink’ them from the colonial paradigm. They argue that it is not enough to simply overthrow or negate the colonial matrices of power: they must be challenged at their core. Thus, Eurocentrism and all of its assumptions, such as global power and commerce, must be fundamentally reassessed, if not rejected, and local colonial impositions such as religion, artificial ethnic divisions, gender, class, and regional identity assignments must be revealed for what they are—strategies of imperial subjugation and co-optation.

Like every diasporic person, Vivero has a complicated, constantly modulating identity that is forever in a state of ‘becoming’. This exhibition raises cascading questions not just about past and present Andean culture, but about the meaning of personal and cultural identity, the significance of narrative in meaning making, the connotation of time and place, and the societal-cultural impact exerted on Andeans today by a de facto continuation of colonialism in the Andes under the guise of multinational mineral extraction.

This exhibition presents a mesh of interconnected visual narratives that tell a story about the vagaries of communication, along roadways and networks, and through veils of language and images.

As her art practice is grounded in a foundational commitment to transcultural artistic connections, she travels globally making, installing, and exhibiting her sculptures, and has made deep collaborative connections with artists from many nations.

Intersectionality suffuses Vivero’s art, although it is based firmly in Latin-American decolonial theory. Stuart Hall describes why people like Micaela de Vivero can ‘speak, sing, and write so eloquently’: ‘[They] learn to inhabit more than one identity, dwell in more than one culture, and speak in more than one language…

[Their] cultural identity is always something, but it is never just one thing: such identities are always open, complex, under construction, taking part in an unfinished game…

(T)hey move into the future through a symbolic detour through the past.’ 1

Micaela de Vivero infuses each of her images with multiple cultural meanings so that they can ‘mean’ in multiple ways, culturally, socially, and temporally. By unfixing and destabilizing meaning and message, image and emotion, and by ‘delinking’ visual meanings from single normative social or cultural meaning, she enables images and ideas to act as slippery and multi-accented ‘sliding signifiers’. She thereby interlaces her objects and images with multiple open, complex, contingent ideas and intersectional identities that slip and slide within an admixture of her Andean heritage, her engagement with today’s globalized culture and economy, and her equally significant lived history as a global citizen. In Mining the Qhapaq Ñan, Vivero addresses her own Andean cultural past to produce a profoundly decolonial installation narrative.

1

Stuart Hall. The Fateful Triangle. Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) 2017. 171, 173, 174.

3

At the height of Tawantinsuyu (the Inkan empire), Qhapaq Ñan was a vast and sophisticated Inkan system of roads that extended for almost 25,000 miles along the interior spine of the Andes and along the Peruvian coast, connecting an empire of eleven million people. It was used for commercial and military transport, and for an elaborate communication system. The major parts of the road were paved and some sections included stairways, aqueducts, bridges, complex drainage systems, tambos (way stations at one-day intervals for official travelers) and qullqas (warehouse administrative centers). Peasants were forbidden to travel on the road on penalty of death.

Tawantinsuyu spread along 2,000 miles from north to south, and was divided into four large regions, which were ruled directly from the city of Cusco at its center from which all its agricultural and mining administration, all its accounting, roads, rivers, and state-sponsored aqueducts, and all its wealth reported to and originated. Yet, the golden years of Tawantinsuyu lasted a mere one hundred years.

The city of Cusco was founded in 1200, but Inkan power was relatively local until 1438, when Machu Picchu was built, and it ended in 1532 with the Spanish conquest. It is important to remember, however, that Andean culture had a long and distinguished history before and after Inkan rule, just as it is also important to remember the inverse. The Spanish came to Peru for gold and land, for power and plenty. They had no vision to comprehend the great accomplishments of Andean culture: they only saw a high mountain terrain that was rough and steep with marginally arable soil and a

people who lacked a ‘written’ language and worked without the wheel, iron, or mortar, thus justifying, in their minds, their assessment of them as ‘savages’ and their brutal conquest. This encounter and its legacy are the twinned subjects of Micaela de Vivero’s exhibition.

Mining the Qhapaq Ñan is an exhibition that presents a series of pathways into this dialogue of encounter. It engages in a number of provocative sustained decolonial conversations

2 Temple of the Sun, Machu Picchu, Peru 4

that loop and swirl in-and-around Micaela de Vivero’s own personal encounter with the sixteenth century Andean author Felipe Guaman Poma De Ayala (ca. 15351616). Between 1587 and 1613, Guaman Poma wrote an almost 1,200-page letter from his home in the Andes to King Philip III of Spain about his own encounter with the Spanish. The letter was composed in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, with almost 400 illustrations, and entitled El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government). The epistle describes the history of Peru, its conquest by Spain, and the illegitimacy of colonial rule. In Mining the Qhapaq Ñan, Vivero brilliantly interweaves images and texts from this

remarkable document into her own work to reveal how closely Guaman Poma conceptualized and constructed many of the intellectual pillars of decoloniality almost concurrently with colonization; how Andean political, economic, and cultural sophistication was at the very least equal to (and in Guaman Poma’s case intellectually exceeding) that of its European peers of the early 1600s; and how the still widely-prevalent cultural ‘miscommunication’ between colonizers and the colonized denies the humanity of much of the Global South. She creates works of art that use Guaman Poma’s images as a staging point for her own brilliantly wide-ranging, more abstracted imagery that soars and swoops, dives and dances, whispers

3 Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, images from the book Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1612), images of pre-Hispanic artifacts, altered found text in handwriting. (installation view, Denison Museum) 5

and retracts, touches and withdraws, and tells us all kinds of multilayered, interlaced, half-heard, half-comprehended, half-understood, and yet, somehow visually clarion-clear stories about the complexity of Andean life, culture, history, and identity, past, present and future.

Vivero’s installation begins thematically with fourteen works comprising the Guaman Poma series (fourteen pieces, hand-made paper with gold leaf, images from the book El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government) by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1612), images of pre-Hispanic artifacts, and altered found hand-written text) that are to the right of the visitor as one enters the gallery space.

Guaman Poma’s letter was neither the

first nor the most famous illustrated socalled New World encounter narrative.

The most well-known narrative produced by colonists is the sprawling thirteen-folio-volume work published by three generations of the Flemish De Bry family between 1590 and 1634 (Theodor De Bry (1528-1598); Johan Theodor DeBry (1561-1623); Johan Israel DeBry (d.

1611); and Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650)) that ‘documents’ a series of conquests by the English, Spanish, and Dutch. These are significant in that they mirror the Flemish prejudices of their sponsors, presenting the English as peaceful settlers, the Spanish as cruel and greedy marauders, and the Dutch as driven by a holy mission to convert the ‘savage’ American peoples while seizing

4, 5 Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, images from the book Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1612), images of pre-Hispanic artifacts, altered found text in handwriting.

6

education reserved for very few, but also in Spanish rhetoric, scripture, philosophy and law. His family enjoyed special privileges under Inkan rule as ambassadors to newly acquired Inkan territory, but under Spanish rule his Yarovika ethnic group fell out of favor and by 1600, his patrimony had been confiscated and he was banished from his home. He appealed for recompense directly to the Spanish king in his El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), but the missive never reached the king and was lost for 300 years. It resurfaced in the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen in 1908, where the entire volume with illustrations can be accessed today online at

materials, with variable lasting legacies: protestant nations tended to annihilate indigenous populations, while Catholic Spain, although brutal, tended to exploit power structures already in place, allowing a path for some favored indigenous individuals to enter the ‘lettered’ classes and enabling a small group of American indigenous authors to produce a literature of resistance. Guaman Poma was one of these individuals. He self-identified as a Christian, ethnic Andean whose father was a provincial personage of the Peruvian Yarovika culture, loyal to the Spanish king, and whose mother was related to Tupac Yupanqui, the tenth Inkan leader.

Guaman Poma was educated in the highly intellectual Andean skill of khipukamayoq (khipu encoder and reader), a level of

http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/survey.htm

6, 7 Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, images from the book Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1612), images of pre-Hispanic artifacts, altered found text in handwriting.

7

8

argument that Andeans were descendants of Christians moved to Peru by God after the ‘Flood’ and therefore not only equals to but relatives of the Spanish. His key conclusion, however, was that Andeans were neither inferiors nor subjects of imperial Spain but held sovereign prerogatives over their own nation (and he to his own property). He conceded that the king had a right to rule Peru from Spain (he was after all lobbying him for justice) but rejected colonial rule.

Guaman Poma’s letter is inestimably significant: it is a proud decolonial statement spoken directly to the King of Spain a mere sixty years into Spanish colonial rule in the Andes. It did not resist Spanish colonial power: it disrupted and undermined the premise on which the entire colonial enterprise, and by extension, the Eurocentric history of encounter, was built. Guaman Poma wrote in both Spanish and Quechuan using the authority of both to engage as an intellectual equal with his imperial opponents, to turn the power of the Spanish legal, rhetorical, authorial, and ethical system against itself, and to argue that his Andean people were equal to the Spanish, thus deserving of equal rights and equal justice. Then he took one step further: he created an almost wholly Andean-centric illustrated world view. Not only did her center his maps on Andean culture as the world’s center, but he placed the city of Cusco at its center with all power radiating from its golden center. And, although Guaman Poma was well-versed in European visual rhetoric and frequently references

Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno is brilliant both in its simplicity and its sophistry: Guaman Poma argues that Peruvians at large and he in particular deserved their land returned because the conquest and colonization of Peru were illegal on the grounds that Peru was a ‘civilized’ (even Christian) nation and its citizens equal to their Spanish counterparts. In a magnificent twist of European logic, he turns the philosophical, ethical, and legal weight of Spain against itself. He cites a Spanish legal argument made by the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, which posits that the military conquest of a land and the subjugation of its people in the ‘New World’ was ‘just’ only when there was evidence that the indigenous people in question were ‘natural slaves’, their government was ‘tyrannical’, their culture ‘cruel’. Guaman Poma describes in great detail the many facets of Andean culture in his letter, seeking to prove its longstanding history, complex social structure, and civil order; the sophisticated and just administration of its government, economy, and legal system; the theological authority of its religions; the vibrancy of its culture and festivals; and to mount a detailed defense of its culture as free from tyranny (in stark contrast to Spain). He notes particularly that Inkan rulers invited the Spanish to join them in good faith, to enter into legal treaties with them, and even offered to ransom their illegally imprisoned ruler’s life for a roomful of gold, while the Spanish reneged on all of these agreements. And he even makes the theologically dubious

8, 9, 10, 11 (clockwise, left), 12, 13 (below) Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, images from the book Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1612), images of pre-Hispanic artifacts, altered found text in handwriting.

9

10

11

familiar individual European visual motifs in his illustrations, he almost always embedded them within an Andean universe by using the Andean visual rhetorical space that mandated a radiation of power from the center of an image and a strict spatial arrangement of echelons from upper to lower and from right to left, respectively. In some images he even re-dresses the Spanish king and lords in Inkan robes, visually absorbing them into Andean society rather than the reverse.

One of the first Guaman Poma images that Vivero uses in her Guaman Poma series of hand-made paper works is the Cart del Autor (page 8 of Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno) (see fig. 5), the page on which the author introduces himself and establishes his authority as an aristocrat, an intellectual, and a scholar worthy of addressing the Spanish king.

He notably asserts both his mother’s aristocratic Inkan lineage and his father’s Andean heritage, attesting in multiple ways to the premise of his treatise. Vivero’s Guaman Poma series individually and collectively establishes a dialogue with the author’s text and imagery by echoing, amplifying, and complicating the author’s astonishing words and vision. Her images are mostly constructed from handmade paper produced from abaca pulp, a strong manila hemp fiber often backed by what appears to be gold-leaf but is sometimes actually copper intentionally used to mimic gold but which oxidizes to green and bleeds through the paper, revealing itself as ‘false’ gold. The surfaces are written over, drawn upon, scored and

altered with abstract and semi-abstract forms, as if to both assert and question whether this or any other image or text in this or other series by Vivero can claim either physical or intellectual stability, a single narrative, or a unified meaning. In Cart del Autor Vivero immediately draws our attention to Guaman Poma’s complex diverse intersectional identity as the source of his extraordinary vision.

Two pieces by Vivero, one featuring Guaman Poma’s Mapa Mundi of the Indies of Peru, showing the quadripartite division of the Inka empire of Tawantinsuyu (page 1001) (see figs. 4 and 18), and the other the very large Puma City (four pieces, 112”x 36”x 2” each, handmade paper with gold leaf and dyed sisal) (see fig. 21) can be read together as allegorical maps that give direction to her exhibition. The first image is a small hand-made paper work from the Guaman Poma series showing his Mapa Mundi, which is his allegorical vision of Tawantinsuyu at its height and an idealized world that was by then beyond the living memory of most post-conquest Andeans. Guaman Poma’s Tawantinsuyu is visually harmonious, orderly, and implicitly just; it is ringed to the north by forest and mountains, to the south by the sea. It is clearly divided into its four regions by diagonal lines and at its center lies the city of Cusco, the symbolic, geographical, intellectual, and administrative center of the empire, denoted by its major buildings, its heraldic signs, and the emperor and empress. Each of the four kingdoms (Chinchay Suyu to

14, 15, 16, 17 (clockwise, right) Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, images from the book Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1612), images of pre-Hispanic artifacts, altered found text in handwriting.

12

13

the north, Ande Suyu to the east, Colla Suyu to the south, and Cunti Suyu to the west) are likewise represented by their respective heraldic signs and monarchs. In the Andean universe, the right quadrants denote maleness and left quadrants denote femaleness; upper quadrants denote relative superiority and lower quadrants relative inferiority.

Everything and everyone in Tawantinsuyu have their rightful place. Each suyu, for instance, is subdivided into wamani (provinces), which are further divided into ayllu (tribal or family units) and each of these is overseen by a local

administrator responsible or recording the payment and transport of all agricultural and communal labor taxes to the central government. In a land of highaltitude terraced agriculture that demanded careful and precise crop development, water management, and land and soil conservation, every piece of produce was stored, recorded, accounted for, and regulated in communal warehouses in preparation for lean years.

Tawantinsuyu is represented as a balanced, ordered polity at the center of a world in which there is no sign of, need for, or room for the Spanish.

14

18 (left), 19, 20 (above) Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, images from the book Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1612), images of pre-Hispanic artifacts, altered found text in handwriting. (details) 15

Puma City (four pieces, 112”x 36”x 2” each, hand-made paper with gold leaf and dyed sisal) (see fig. 21) by contrast is a very large work of art that dominates our vision, most of the far wall, and the first quadrant of the gallery space as soon as we enter the exhibition. It echoes, elaborates, and builds upon Guaman Poma’s allegorical map of Tawantinsuyu. Puma City comprises a huge glowing image of a crouching puma laid upon four panels that welcomes us to the installation and immediately challenges the hegemony of Spanish colonial history. Puma City is a map

of Cusco, understood as the crouching puma and the power of the earth , and it describes both the symbolic order of the city and the center of the empire. Like the empire at large, Cusco is quadripartite and organized hierarchically into a right male sector, left female sector, hanan (superior upper-half) and hurin (inferior lower-half). Each quarter relates to one of the four regions of the empire. The four main roads of the Qhapaq Ñan extend from the four sides of the Hawkaypata (the central plaza) in the belly of the puma to the four regions of Tawantinsuyu. The temple of Saqsaywaman,

21 Puma City, 112’’ x 36’’ x 2’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf and dyed sisal

16

corners of the four regions of Tawantinsuyu to Cusco, the four quadrants of Micaela de Vivero’s installation lead from Puma City to Qhapaq Ñan to its right in the second quadrant of the installation, and then on to the Guaman Poma series in the third and fourth quadrants, and back again to Puma City. The difference is that Vivero’s journey is circular. And at the center of her Puma City the treasure of Cusco is not gold but the void of blank mauve gallery wall at the center of the four panels: her treasure unknowable and held secret in the sometimes unreadable, hearts of her other works such as her Khipus, Wak’as, and Bundles.

dedicated to Inti (the sun), is located in the puma’s head. Two rivers outline its body.

And the most important religious center of Tawantinsuyu, the temple of Qorikancha, is in the south. It was reputedly covered in gold and aligned along 41 ceque (sacred pathways) by way of wak’as (sacred places) and was visible throughout the Cusco valley. Vivero’s mural presents her version of Puma City as a stunning four-part mural that emanates from the soft mauve wall on which it hangs. The golden rays of its roads, waterways, and temples all lead from the four corners of these panels to their center. Just as the roads of Qhapaq Ñan lead from the four

17

The vagaries of trying to communicate and even miscommunicate across time, place, and deeply separated cultures is a refrain that appears time and again in Vivero’s work but it is often encapsulated here through the khipu. Early Andean culture was considered anomalous by the Spanish for its lack of a written language despite its robust and complex information storage record-keeping, and communications systems through richly encoded khipus (elaborately knotted bundles of strings).

These that were so intricately composed and so difficult to ‘read’ that only a select few in society could ‘write’ or ‘read’ the cords. Even then, each area had its own system of knotting, twisting, direction of rotation, shape of knots, material, and color coding to determine meaning, that khipus were impossible for an outsider to decode. A khipu is a bundle of variously colored knotted (usually) cotton cords tied together onto one main cord to encode information. The basis of a khipu is a thick horizontal ‘main cord’ that extends loosely from left (with a knot) to right (where it hangs loosely). Numerous thinner ‘pendant cords’ are looped or suspended from the ‘main cord’ like a fringe. Each pendant cord can be knotted in several ways and at several intervals to transmit numerical and language-based meaning. One thin top cord can be looped over the main cord to summarize the text hanging from the main cord. Subsidiary cords can be hung from individual pendant cords and cords can be looped, spun, and plied in different directions to nuance meaning. Some khipus seem to communicate on a ten-point sitional system but there is no

universal means of translation and current khipu makers cannot translate Inkan khipus. The Inkas used khipus for state-wide accounting, to record census data, military and religious information, and to monitor the movement of goods and people throughout the empire. The khipukamayoq (specialized khipu ‘reader’) was exalted for his intelligence, ingenuity, and skill. He held the code secrets and passed them from father to son. The practice of basic khipu writing survives today but in very basic form. The Spanish destroyed the most complex Inkan khipus and the skill to read them has been lost. Khipus, however, raise an important question for the decolonial enterprise.

Don’t we need to reimagine and reframe how we conceptualize recorded communication to embrace forms of communication that breach the writing paradigm and alter how we think—as in the khipu?

22 Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each (detail) 18

Micaela de Vivero includes several images of khipus in Mining the Qhapaq Ñan. Several are part of the Guaman Poma series, while others are free-standing. The first refers to Guaman Poma’s Secretario del Ingla I Conzejo, (secretary and accountant) (page 360) (see fig. 23 & 24), a khipucamayuc. This khipucamayuc is shown as relatively simply dressed, displaying a khipu in its full horizontal extension. The main cord extends from the large knot at the left, is hung with vertical pendant cords, and tapers off to the right. The knots on the pendant cords are barely visible as befitting such classified information. Vivero places the image to the bottom left of a larger page of hand-made paper to which she has attached a natural-colored khipu with knots on its pendant strings. Very little of the gold leaf shows through in this image.

The impact is less dramatic but more disquieting than others in the series. It seems to both assert the intellectual significance of khipu and reminds us of the staggering loss of knowledge they both contained and that was required to construct and to read them. Very few (about six hundred) delicate khipus evaded the Spanish and survived intact, but none exist in their original context, and none of the surviving khipus have given up their encoded contents. Khipus were used in Andean culture before the 1300s. After conquest, the documentation they contained was so valuable that the Spanish retained khipucamayuc for some time, but the khipucamayuc refused to divulge the secrets of their knots and the Spanish, who were increasingly threatened by inaccessible khipu knowledge, first banned khipus in the 1550s and

23, 24 Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each (details) 19

and then burned them as idolatrous in 1583. After 1600, khipus continued as a marginalized contraband form of communication, but by 1620, they were rare, and by 1700 were almost obsolete. By the mid-18th century, they enjoyed a limited revival in a much simplified form amongst villagers for local record-keeping and in the burial of the dead, where they are still used.

Guaman Poma’s Contador Major Itezokero, Tawantin Suyu Khipug Kuraka (chief accountant and treasurer Tawantin Suyu) (page 362) (see fig. 8) shows a chief accountant, also a khipucamayuc, but of a higher order than the secretary.

In this image, the khipucamayuc’s clothing and headdress are more luxurious and elaborate than the secretary, and the khipu he holds is more extensive, although there are still no ancillary knots on the pendant cords. On the other hand, the artist does include a chart at the bottom of the page laying out in simple form a basic numerical knotting system. Vivero places this image in the same location on her larger page as the previous image, but the overall impact is quite different as befitting the chief accountant’s status. It is more luxurious and the green copper tarnish seeps through large areas at the top of the page. Additionally, she adds a lengthy explanatory passage to the paper describing how khipus functioned in Andean culture, and how they were encoded, transported, and decoded. She places more emphasis on how khipus functioned as instruments of social order and enrichment, on their role in public administration and accounting, on how they kept track of millions of people, stored information on

the entire Inkan economy, and recorded critical statistics on taxation, demography, military organization, numeric and other valuations, legal and judicial procedures, calendric and religious information, and possibly historical narratives.

Khipu records were always stored in duplicate: one copy was stored locally and the second was archived in Cusco.

They were wrapped into a conical shape for transport and storage. In a third image used by Vivero, Guaman Pomo’s Gvaiac Poma, Apo, (Deputy Provincial Administrator (suyuyuq) of the region of Svivioc) (page 350) (see fig. 7) shows an even higher administrator (usually the son of a qhapaq apu (Andean lord)) dressed in elaborately decorated royal robes and a headdress holding both a conically rolled khipu ready for transportation and an unrolled one. In Vivero’s larger work, the artist has added a long straight road to the background leading from the lower right to the top right of the paper, suggesting the path of the khipu to Cusco. Khipukamayoq did not transport khipus, rather specialized chaskis (runners), who were unable to read them ran between relay stations passing the khipus from one to the next until they reached Cusco. A khipu could travel up to 190 miles per day in this way: its data totally secured. Vivero’s image shows the long straight Qhapaq Ñan to Cusco rising through the golden inflected landscape to the top right of the image, the center of Andean knowledge, power, and wealth. Finally, Vivero’s image of Guaman Poma’s Inka Storehouses (colcas) and Inka Officials (page 337) (see figs. 12 & 13) shows a series of central Cusco storehouses where taxable food, clothing, and raw materials from 20

each suyu (region) of the Tawantinsuyu was stored in state colcas (storehouses) to be redistributed in times of famine.

Guaman Poma makes no apologies for the authority of the khipu or for his right to speak as an Andean person in his letter to the King of Spain.

Although he wrote ‘I have no written record except for khipus and the memories and accounts of some old Indians’ (folio I:5), his text and images belie his false modesty. He makes powerful claims to intellectual authority, not just through a skillful appropriative use of Spanish rhetorical skills, but also by asserting his expansive decolonial Andean authority as a khipukamayoq whose intellectual dexterity ‘with the strings …[it was claimed]… governed their entire dominion’ and by developing one of the first extensive direct-testimony narratives of the Spanish conquest from the Andean perspective. Guaman Poma’s letter includes many dozens of illustrated biographies of historical Inkan personages and many more eyewitness testimonies of

major and minor living personages as well as those of ordinary people who describe the order and range of duties within the Inkan polity. One such person is the Weaver of thirty-three years (page 217) (see figs. 17, 22 & 25) whose life and work the author claimed was recounted to him in person (page 339) and is featured in one of Vivero’s images from the Guaman Poma series. Another, also used by Vivero, entitled October: Time of watching over the fields in this kingdom; Uma Raymi Killa, month of the feast of origins (page 1169), is also bursting with specific detail. It shows a farmer watching over his neatly organized fields of sprouting plants. He wears the skin of what may be a wolf or a llama, carries a staff in one hand with a dead bird attached to it as a warning to other birds, and raises a club in the other hand to chase off another creature seeking to feed on his crops. The scene, which includes a castle on a hill in the background, is consciously constructed to emanate peace, prosperity, order, and discipline.

25 Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each (detail)

26 Guaman Poma, 16’’ x 20’’ each (detail) 21

Micaela de Vivero follows the Guaman Poma series with three of her own visual renditions of Khipus (three pieces, 16”x20” each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, pigs’ intestine, and cotton) (see figs. 27, 28 & 29) that hang on the right entrance wall of the gallery in the Puma City quadrant. These images are framed like the Guaman Poma series but are less tied to the literal world than the former, and she allows them to escape easily into the realm of the allegorical and abstract.

In them, Vivero again makes use of her signature hand-made paper treated with gold leaf and she has allowed the copper backing to oxidize and bleed through in large areas. But to this surface she has now added cotton strings of khipus

and has wrought the surface with pigs’ intestines to create reliefs that are vaguely reminiscent of roughly wrought abstracted hieroglyphs or calligraphy, of crudely tilled fields, or sublime scenes of horror and devastation. Vivero has encoded her abstracted khipus so deeply, so complexly, and with so many conflicting cultural references, that her multiple mixed messages simultaneously confound, confuse, attract, disturb, dismay, and delight us. Like their originals, Vivero’s Khipus are beautiful and difficult to observe: they keep their secrets and they remind us that meaning, identity, and the legacy of colonialism is complex and difficult, and it is neither easily nor quickly comprehended, understood, or resolved.

27 Khipus, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, pigs’ intestines and cotton thread

28 Khipus, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, pigs’ intestines and cotton thread 22

29 Khipus, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, pigs’ intestines and cotton thread 23

30, 31 Khipus, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, pigs’ intestines and cotton thread (details) 24

32, 33 Khipus, 16’’ x 20’’ each, hand-made paper with gold leaf, pigs’ intestines and cotton thread (details) 25

To the visitor’s immediate left at exhibition entrance, Vivero has installed a very large vertical three-dimensional actual Khipu (dyed and undyed alpaca wool, gold-leaf covered wood) with magenta, purple, black, and unbleached knotted cords hanging from a gentle arc of bent wood covered in goldleaf that reaches out from the wall (see fig.

34). The hanging cords of alpaca wool trail slightly on the floor, welcoming the viewer to enter into a conversation that seems to be already in progress among the various works in the installation.

The huge coiled stylized cat picked out in gold leaf on the map of Puma City (see fig. 21) gleams on the wall ahead.

To its right and occupying the second quadrant of the gallery space, sits a series of soaring, thin gold- and silver-leaf covered bent-wood sculptures Qhapaq Ñan (gold and silver leaf covered wood, cotton thread, alpaca wool, and sisal) named for the exhibition. They nod to the Guaman Poma images across from them in the third and fourth quadrants of the gallery. Between them the space is punctuated by an ancillary smaller gold-leaf covered bent-wood piece, high pedestals on which sit several Wak’as, and a low pedestal with two felted pieces called Bundles. Qhapaq Ñan is a complex series of objects that functions both as the core of the exhibition and its animating force. It speaks with subtle elegance and powerful resonance about Andean history, culture, landscape, and of the exploitation of its natural resources, during both its colonial past and today.

34 Unwritten, gold and silver leaf covered wood, dyed alpaca wool 26

35 and 36 Mining the Qhapac Ñan, installation view, Denison Museum 27

On one level, the fronds of wood that Vivero has laminated, bent, and then covered in either gold- or silver-leaf are deliberately very slightly mis-matched; they are inexpensive pieces of wood hand-patched together like the jerry-rigged ladders and supports that mimic the sub-standard reality most low-paid Andean workers face in makeshift and weakly regulated mines. Yet these fronds are covered in the gold and silver that is still found so abundantly in the high Andes even after a millennium of mining. Both gold and silver have a thick, deep meaning for Andean culture, and gold was the rationale for both the Spanish incursion into the Americas, and for almost every corporate incursion into the area since.

Micaela de Vivero’s wooden structures capture something of the fragility and instability of the lives of local Andean people, who eke out a living working at ill-paid jobs at the behest of multi-national mining companies or in illegal mines, to labor in difficult and dangerous conditions, and rely on insufficient and unsafe infrastructures. The global mining industry is built upon the sweat and blood of local inhabitants who are supported by little more than shaky wooden ladders held together by knotted ropes and who live in an increasingly degraded environment that these same people held in balance for centuries. Today, Andean mining accounts for a large percentage of the global supply of gold and silver, but the profits are not

37 Qhapaq Ñan, gold & silver leaf covered wood, dyed cotton thread, alpaca wool and sisal (detail)

38 Qhapaq Ñan, gold & silver leaf covered wood, dyed cotton thread, alpaca wool and sisal (detail) 28

shared with the local miners or their communities. The Yanacocha mine in Peru (owned by the Denver-based Newmont Mining Corporation), which spreads over sixty square miles, is estimated to be the world’s most productive gold mine and has thus far yielded over $7 billion in gold. In 2020, Peru was listed as holding 18.2 percent of global silver reserves, and ranked second in global silver production. In 2023, mining represented 63.9 percent of Peruvian exports and accounted for 8.5 percent of Peruvian GDP (a larger share than any other industrial sector). Foreign firms provide most of the investment in mining and, since deregulation in the 1990s, there has been almost no limit to large-scale privatization and expansion of mining. The high levels of mercury and cyanide used to extract gold and silver from increasingly depleted veins have polluted or destroyed forests, arable land, and waterways. The degraded environment is conjoined to high levels of poverty: although 40 percent of Peruvians overall live in poverty, those residing in the Andes, where mining corporations reap vast profits and only offer locals the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs, the poverty rate is 70 percent.

Micaela de Vivero’s sculptures suggest this powerful narrative through their reaching and straining gold and silver poles that are like the ladders, the branches, and the byways of a fragile agricultural environment and homeland once again in jeopardy because of its precious metals.

Yet, there are always other narratives at play in Vivero’s art. In Qhapaq Ñan, the group of four gold-leaf covered wooden branches at one side of the group, for instance, reach upward and out like the

39 (right) Qhapaq Ñan, gold and silver leaf covered wood, dyed cotton thread, alpaca wool and sisal (front - installation view) 29

four golden roads of Qhapaq Ñan that emanate to the north, south, east and west from Cusco toward the four regions of the Inkan empire and beyond to the four corners of the Andean world and beyond, into the sun. The golden fronds also transmogrify in our minds into plant forms, that literally reach energetically for the sun and burst through the metal grid that hangs above and tries to restrain them. As they do, they claim new territory through and beyond the grid—a new decolonial future. Vivero’s work is always redolent with meaning: while she makes a haunting reference to the fraught colonial history of mining with her shaky wooden frames, she simultaneously reclaims her Andean heritage, reestablishes her Andean narrative, and reasserts a decolonial way forward. And then she, like Guaman Poma, goes further. Tucked in behind Qhapaq Ñan on the wall at right angles to the Guaman Poma series, Vivero has hung a smaller tripartite piece called 1492 (see fig. 41) in which she makes what may be her most incisive critique of American colonialization yet. Fourteen hundred and ninety two is the date when Columbus allegedly ‘discovered’ and claimed the Americas for Spain. Two images show blood-red ribbon-like forms created with red-dyed pig intestines and hand-made paper over gold leaf underlays and overlays, while a third piece takes the form of a conically-rolled red, purple, and white khipu. In the two paper pieces, the abstracted writhing and twisted forms of the pig intestines evoke both the violent bloodshed of the conquest and the quest for gold, while they parody the twisted cords and knots of the partnered khipu.

But they also echo the grace and beauty of growing plants as well as tangled roots, and ribbons of the roads and byways of maps. Their roads, however, unlike those of the Qhapaq Ñan, are stained by the blood of the American nations conquered, devastated, and robbed of their wealth by the colonists after 1492.

Vivero’s other Qhapaq Ñan sculptures in silver and in gold continue her imbricated decolonial narrative. The rich roads, branches, and tendrils seem to grow naturally from the rich deep loam of a culture that is enriched by its fraught and difficult past, through the complex colored khipu cords that hang from their forms, and by its equally entangled present. They are haunted by the carefully orchestrated shadows that Vivero has arranged each branch to cast on the wall of the gallery behind the piece. The sculptures seem to grasp at an uncertain and complicated, sometimes wobbly, and clearly uneasy future, but they push through the grid overhead, at once tentative and determined, into a future that is their own. Vivero makes no weighty monumental claims in her physically light, but intellectually profound, and intensely poignant work. Rather, she suggests many things simultaneously. She posits a world in which there are no certainties, where there are more questions than answers, and where we are never quite arriving and never fully formed.

Her work makes clear that identity is multi-dimensional, unstable, forever in a state of becoming, and deeply intersectional. No idea is ever simply one thing, no person is simply one identity: we are all buffeted by a mass of histories, of cultures, of pasts, and of presents.

30

40 Qhapac

Ñan, gold and silver leaf covered wood, dyed cotton thread, alpaca wool and sisal 31

41 1492, hand-made paper with gold leaf, dyed pigs’ intestines, dyed and non-dyed alpaca wool

sometimes carved as trapezoid window spaces in buildings through which the spirit passed to reverberate along the length of a building or house and through the generations, mixing past and present, wrapping layers of time, place, and meaning together. In Vivero’s Wak’as, the artist has created a series of small aluminum wire-framed sculptures covered with stretched pigs’ intestines to emulate, in abstracted form, a web of intellectual and spiritual meanings. These works are like spiritual puzzles within puzzles, holding secrets at their center. The outer shell is strong and translucent but almost opaque. Pigs’ intestines are a flexible but strong medium that can be stretched easily when wet but they dry to a hard, taut, blanched, veined parchment that can appear simultaneously delicate and ethereal and like rough desiccated human skin.

Punctuating the interior space of Mining the Qhapaq Ñan, on the entrance wall and in the center of the gallery, are several small sites where Vivero has placed both Wak’as (seven pieces, aluminum wire, pigs’ intestines, gold leaf) (see figs. 42 - 47) and Bundles (two pieces, felt and colored threads) (see figs. 48 & 49) as if to conjure up spiritual guides to assist the ideas embodied in Khipu, Puma City, Qhapaq Ñan, and even Guaman Poma on their perambulation around this complex and wondrous installation.

Wak’as are animated by camay (spiritual force) but they can inhabit powerful places, constructed shrines, or a natural or created objects. In pre-conquest Andean culture, revered wak’as of many kinds, including the mummified remains of ancestors, were often placed in ceques, spiritual lines that radiated from the capital 32

Each of Vivero’s Wak’as is layered to create a set of enveloped interior spaces, some of which are colored with oxidized copper leaf, and which combine and recombine like secrets. Their nested centers are protected: they offer both refuge and hope as well as a secret and a prize. Like ceques, however, they are conduits of spiritual power rather than its embodiment, so their cores are empty.

Vivero’s work is never simple: her Wak’as

deliberately bemuse us with their mixed-messages. They suggest one thing, and then tell us another. The center of her Wak’as is a spiritual keynote: its negative space becomes positive and full, taking on its own shape, identity, and meaning. It is buoyant, fresh, and new. It is not a void. It is no longer built on the ruins of the past but newly constructed in Vivero’s own current visual language and on her terms.

42 (above), 43, 44, 45 (left to right, below) Wak’as, aluminum wire, pigs’ intestines, gold leaf

33

46 Wak’as, aluminum wire, pigs’ intestines, gold leaf

47 Wak’as, aluminum wire, pigs’ intestines, gold leaf

The two cornucopia Bundles (see figs 48 & 49), wrought in felted wool, form similarly new identities in mummified form.

Mummified human remains were frequently displayed in Andean homes. One Bundle is dusty pink filled with bundles of colored string in earth tones; and the other warm grey filled with mostly blue, white, and grey bundles of string. Most of the strings are hidden within the body of each horn. The colors are soft and gentle in keeping with the natural material warmth of the felted wool, radiating a sense of warmth and riches, and underscoring llama wool’s significance as a natural resource for Andean culture. The encasing

felted-wool, the bound and hidden forms, and the string to bind suggest mummification, but they also evoke swaddling and the wrapping of precious beings and object, while the soft, cozy form of the wool also invokes warmth and protection.

The shape of the cornucopia suggests the display of a bountiful harvest, but the fruits are mostly hidden and secret: they are actually tangled strings of encoded knowledge, that like the cotton strings of khipus is ancient, incomprehensible, and lost to us. Like latter-day khipukamayoq, they refuse to give up their secrets, refuse to reveal their full story, and demand the right to construct their own new narratives.

34

48 and 49 Bundles, felt, colored threads 35

Bringing her installation full circle, Vivero makes one final clever double reference to both Wak’as and Bundles through two pieces in her Guaman Poma series. The first is through an image entitled Topa Inka consulting Wak’as (page 263) (see fig. 9) in which Guaman Poma explicates and complicates the concept of wak’as to claim Andean spiritual supremacy over the Spanish. In the illustration, Inkan King Topa challenges the power of a circle of twelve assembled small wak’as in the form of figures and angular shapes at the base of Huanacauri, the symbolic mountain at the center of Tawantinsuyu while deferring to a single most powerful Huanacauri wak’a on the summit of the mountain. Guaman Poma’s message is visually clear but complex: he posits that the Christian separation of the body and soul (or the spirit and its embodiment) is fully in line with wak’a belief; that the true Andean religion is in fact the pre-Inkan monotheistic worship of the one true Christian God (viz. the mountain top wak’a); and that Inkan polytheism was an aberration. In this visually revolutionary image of decolonial double-speak, Guaman Poma conflates the pre-Inkan Andean monotheism with Inkan polytheism, a gambit that assures Andean visual readers that he holds true to his Andean roots, while also assuring Spanish readers that pre-Inkan Andeans were monotheistic and Christian. Micaela de Vivero clearly recognizes this irony when she attaches enlarged photographs of actual Andean wak’as to her larger work using this manuscript page. These enlarged images of the tiny gold and bronze figures assume an artificially monumental scale, stature, and independence from

their glowing gold and green background, and they dwarf the Guaman Poma page against with which they are juxtaposed.

Wak’as such as these tiny personal items were used in private worship, cast in precious metal, and held dearly. They were deliberately rendered semi-abstractly to invoke the wak’a spirit they embodied, suggesting but not representing their forms. This nuance, like Guaman Poma’s double entendre, was lost on the Spanish and on many since who have misread, misunderstand, and misinterpreted these objects as the products of a ‘primitive’ people, rather than the spiritually and visually abstracted work of a sophisticated culture that understood the deeper meanings of visual reality and abstraction, of metonymy, verisimilitude, and mimesis.

Vivero further complicates this reference with her corresponding reference to llama wak’as and to the cultural significance of llamas in Andean culture in both the Guaman Poma piece that features the Feast of the Inkas: wariqsa, dance arawi, song of the Inka (page 320) (see fig. 10) in which she attaches the image to handmade paper along with enlarged photographs of two tiny gold and a silver llama wak’as. In Feast of the Inkas, an elaborately dressed solo singer and a chorus serenade a red llama during an Inkan feast. The llama was honored, respected and revered: it featured prominently in multiple religious ceremonies, was the favored animal of sacrifice, was often buried with the human dead, and frequently embodied wak’a spirits. It also served as the culture’s major beast of burden, it was its primary source of fresh, smoked, or charqui (de-hydrated) meat; its wool was used for thread and yarn; and its skin, 36

visual interpretation of traditional and modern Andean understandings of ideas, histories, methods, and materials that fly freely to reveal further complexities, contradictions, and conundrums of decoloniality with all their instability, fragility, and potential. There is a brilliantly complex clarity to Micaela de Vivero’s art. Mining the Qhapaq Ñan is a vast intellectual exhibition with many strings and resonances that Vivero has somehow managed to pull together to create an exquisite harmony of ideas and images. I’d like to think that her message is simple but profound: redressing the legacy of colonialism in the Americas (and beyond) is neither simple nor straightforward, but it is important and the first step is acknowledging the significance of those who came before us in this hemisphere. Guaman Poma may have been one of the first decolonial Andean artists but Micaela de Vivero is a worthy heir.

sinew, fat and bone was used for everything from medicine to footwear to musical instruments. In Vivero’s work, she renders the tiny llama wak’as, enormous, alluding to the paradox of the anonymous llama as an integral part of the economic success of a sophisticated culture but also an animal whose sacrifice the society honored spiritually in gold, silver, and song.

Micaela de Vivero’s multilayered imagery, like that of Guaman Poma’s with which she begins Mining the Qhapaq Ñan, bounces between Spanish and Andean references to make fluid, intersectional, transnational commentaries on Andean life and culture.

By using his imagery in concert with her own, Vivero creates complicated, layered, open-ended commentaries on Andean history and culture. Then she moves on to create another body of work that is more untethered, more unconstrained; her own very personal

50 Mining the Qhapac Ñan, installation view, Denison Museum 37

51 (above) Micaela de Vivero (and family) at Machu Picchu in Peru (image, courtesy of the artist)

38

52 (above)

Saksaywaman, 53 (below) Wiñaywayna (images, courtesy of the artist)

39

Thank you to: Eva María Vivero and Jorge Almeida, for coming with me on the 4-day trek to Machu Picchu.

My assistant Ly Nguyen, who has helped me in keeping the production going on a weekly basis, despite all other obligations.

Megan Hancock for offering this exhibition opportunity to me and assistance throughout the way.

Sam Smith for assisting with all the logistics.

David Horton for helping with installation.

Joy Sperling for writing such a brilliant text to accompany the exhibition.

Marion Ramírez for sharing her dance and improvisation talents and activating the installation with her movement.

Eli Lishack for the photos of the “Guaman Poma” piece.

Shruti Shankar for putting the catalog together.

Victor Espinosa for countless hours of conversation and helping the flow of creativity to pursue this research.

Angel Meza for being an amazing guide during the trekking to Machu Picchu.

To the remarkable porteadores who made the trek to Machu Picchu possible, running past me as I was barely managing to keep oxygen flowing into my lungs.

To all my Apus, who have left evidence of the past and lights for the future.

To Pablo, Eva María, Anabela and Paulina.

- Micaela de Vivero

*This work was funded in part by a grant from the Denison University Research Foundation.

40

I

I

'

DENISON MUSEUM

DURF