A RESILIENT CURATORSHIP: ANCESTRAL HERITAGE AND CONTEMPORARY ART

Abstract

The show “Qhapac Ñan: Il grande camino delle Ande” proposes a curatorial statement that articulates the relationship between ancestral cultural heritage and contemporary art from six South American Andean countries. All this in an operation in which the artists usually do not converge with the comparative visibility of their works inserted in the diagram of a sample that includes archaeological, ethnographic and historical material. Convened by an intergovernmental organization and housed by an Italian museum institution, in the most unlikely of scenarios to raise a crossroads of such conceptual resilience, we propose to analyze the asymmetries of this proposal beyond the exotic and its decolonial impostures, where it appears the use of words of Quechua origin that multiply the allegorical meaning and the conceptual density of the forms proposed by six artists who appear with works that, from their different languages, activates the past and project the future, in a demonstration of how artistic practices activate the heritage and at the same time are recognized in it.