PERU & BOLIVIA 2024
Lima/Coast
June 30th, 2025
A few days after the arrival of Camila to Lima, we started our first activities. We were lucky to coincide with the 11th Encounter of Iberoamerican Museums, organized for museum workers from diverse Iberoamerican countries, to discuss and share their projects and findings on three major themes: learnings, affects and memories. Between workshops and conversations, some more inspiring than others, we got to have a better notion of what is taking place or not in various museums in Latin American countries, and what types of projects and museums emerge from particular realities. A project that interested us was the Community Museum of Graciliano Arcila Vélez in Colombia, who have an itinerant motorcycle museum, with which they visit communities with objects from the archive. The presentation from Lucy Astrid Tobón Ospina, “Heritage as a tool for rebuilding the social fabric” was very moving, since she shared how an archeological museum had become a community space for youth to meet up with their peers through workshops, and how these interactions are key for at-risk youth, allowing them to work through their everyday interactions with violence or precarity. The presentation from Karina Giuliana Tarazona Delgado, titled “Amazonian Museum: Community, Identity, Accessibility and Cultural Heritage” revealed the difficulty of maintaining cultural institutions throughout Peru, due to their limited resources. Her project utilized her resources to create a project for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community in Iquitos, learning sign language, and doing activities to transmit knowledge and appreciation for the architecture in Iquitos.
It was interesting to attend the conference as independent curators travelling from Canada – people didn’t know how to fit us into the Latin American discourse. In one of the workshops, we had to explain the work that we do to the group and the importance of agency for us. It surprised us that people genuinely didn’t understand what we meant by “having agency”. In these interactions of dialogue and ideation, we also noticed the diverse levels of participation in the conference. It was clear to us that many people had been sent by their respective institutions, and were very unmotivated and disillusioned with their museum work. Meanwhile, others attended with openness to exchange and collaborate, and with the desire to improve their museum practices.
The location of the encounter was somewhat controversial, since accessing the new National Museum of Peru required a bus trip to Lurín, a city in the Greater Lima Area. Every day of the conference we entered a building that resembled an immense empty space ship that had landed in an inaccessible area for visitors. Through some conversation with local participants we learned that the project of the great museum had failed, since the building was not currently apt for hosting the collection. Which was not surprising, due to the political instability, with inefficient bureaucratic processes and constant change.
We were unable to attend the closing of the conference, since we had a very anticipated visit that day with the artist Dimitri Manga. We arrived at Dimitri’s home studio, where he received us with his large collection of instruments, CDs and books collected since the end of the last century. He talked to us about his experiences with collections from museums in Peru and Mexico, where Dimitri had the opportunity to travel due to research. He told us about his bureaucratic experiences with museums, but it was also surprising to hear that some institutions allowed him to play their instruments from the archive, since here in Canada, that is a rarity. After talking for a while and listening to Dimitri’s original music, he showed us how to hand-build clay to create a number of whistles with 2, 3 and 4 channels, and how to test sounds during the creation process.
The next day we had a workshop with Rosa García, textile artist working under the name of Arácnida Textil. Currently Rosa resides in Santiago, Chile, so we met virtually to learn Andean cord-making. Rosa’s trajectory inspired us immensely, as someone who was inspired to pursue her career due to her curiosity towards textile techniques, and her experience in traditional Peruvian dances. Her process started when as a teenager, she would unravel bracelets to understand their logic, which years later brought her to take workshops and travel to diverse Andean communities to learn more about their textile practices. Rosa also guided us with suggestions about how to request meetings with artesans, mostly women from the community, when we visit Caral and other parts of Peru. She mentioned the importance of sharing and exchanging, reminding us that in the same way that the artesans bring ancestral knowledge, we also bring various knowledge, so these encounters can be based on reciprocity to avoid extractivism. This was key for the rest of our trip.
While in Lima we also had the opportunity to visit various museums: Proyecto Amil, MUCEN (Central Museum), MAD (Museo of Minerals Andrés Del Castillo), San Marcos Museum and Amano Museum. At Proyecto Amil we saw an exhibition with two artistic projects by artist Huanchaco. The work titled, Checán, moved us, since Huanchaco was inspired by and used huaco retratos – ceramic facial portrait vessels of Moche culture – through installations, paintings and collage. Part of the installation had a kind of device with several semicircular containers where huacos were located wearing headphones on their ears. The audio present in the space, emitted through the headphones, was a mix of sounds including recordings of Muchik words recorded by the last person who spoke the language, which disappeared during the start of the 20th century. The huacos in the exhibition were original antique ceramics belonging to the Larco Museum collection, so the gesture of allowing the huacos to hear their native language was very poetic and concrete at the same time – a way to awaken the memory of these ceramic ancestors. At MUCEN we saw the exhibition of artist Felipe Coaquira, who “paints” figures of angels and demons with thread, characters of Andean popular culture and cosmovision. The Museum of Minerals impacted us due to its exhibition design and drawn vinyl didactics explaining textile and ceramic techniques, and the use of VR as an introductory guided tour for the visit. Lastly, the visit to the Amano Museum was very special, since Karina had worked at the museum in 2023. It was great getting access to their special cabinets, and having the chance to engage in more intimate conversations with the museum workers.
To culminate our coastal visit, we took a 4 hour bus ride away from Lima to the ancient city of Caral. Caral was the most ancient civilization of the Americas (3500-1800 B.C). Archeological finds have shown that natural coloured cotton was used by the Caral people and by later pre columbian cultures. Unfortunately, its production declined steadily over the past centuries due to the high demand for white cotton. We went there without a concrete plan, since we didn’t have the contact of the natural cotton artisans we wanted to meet. We visited the tourist ruins, and Karina started asking about the artisans who she had met a few years prior. We got in contact with Yuri, who had just given birth, and invited us to her home. When we arrived, we met Yuri’s mother, Rosa, who generously invited us to have some fruits from her garden and showed us the natural cotton harvested in her home, and the process of spinning yarn. Camila had an ease picking up the spinning technique, while Karina enjoyed removing the seeds from the beige, light brown, greenish and even pinkish cotton puffs. Rosa shared the story of how the seeds came to her thanks to the archeologist and anthropologist, Ruth Shady, who didn’t have success planting them, and decided to share them with people in the area. Rosa was one of the few women who was able to cultivate this precious natural cotton, a resource of the ancestral textiles found in the Caral ruins. This was a short visit that ended with our return to the motel in a motorcycle taxi that made us jump countless times over rocky terrain until the gas ran out halfway through our journey. While we waited for help the beautiful Supe valley said goodbye to us with a gorgeous rainbow during the sunset.
Mending the Museum
Mending the Museum (2023)
Workshop Series:
Narrative Charm
Blackout Poetry
Play it Forward
Cloning and Paper Clay
Clay|Sound|Powah
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