Carlos Jiménez Cahua

wak’a

Looting is a great problem in the archaeological sites of the Andean region. Museums therein, in a virtuous fulfillment of their educational role, often directly address this issue in their displays. On a visit to such a museum, Jiménez Cahua saw on display a few ceramics that had only recently been repatriated after an attempted smuggling out of the country. These particular artifacts, after their illegal removal from archaeological sites, had been painted over with wild, garish colors in order to fool authorities into thinking they were modern objects. Thankfully authorities were cognizant of this ploy, and the ceramics were saved from their total loss into the black market. When the time to display these particular items came, the museum professionals, rather than erase the most recent history of these artifacts and remove all the new paint from them, they instead chose to remove only a small, vertical strip of it, so as to explicitly visualize their attempted removal into the wrong hands. With this piece, Jiménez Cahua made a facsimile of these brilliantly displayed artifacts. However, he made permanent the awful, illicit paint job on them by glazing these ceramics with those garish colors, being careful to preserve a vertical strip of the piece in its “unaltered” state.

antara

These pieces, in style and function, imitate pan flutes, also known as “antaras”, which are very common in contemporary music practices in the Andean region today as well as in the past. The artist made these instruments out of scavenged materials: steel, copper, bottles, yarn, found wood and branches. Copper was intended as a salient material choice since this valuable metal has long replaced the initial precious metals, gold and silver, that first attracted European invaders to the Andean region in the 16th century. Today, nearly 500 years later, Peru is one of the leading copper exporters in the world, despite the noxious environmental and economic record of those multinational corporations with rights to its extraction. Jiménez Cahua’s goal in the near future is to hold a concert that includes some or all of these functional instruments he made, perhaps to collaborate with musicians. However, the artist, whose purpose is not just functionality, also produced a 3 meter high steel antara. Such a size makes the instrument almost unplayable, while at the same time suggesting musicality or noise with its familiar design.