Misunderstanding has shaped human history.
When the campaigns of extirpation in the Andes of South America were ordered, the shopping list of the inquisitors included 'huacas'. According to the people that named them, Huacas are sacred animistic entities that can manifest on Earth in endless forms - from mountains to human-made objects. This posed a significant problem for the Spanish arrivals since they did not fit any criteria within Western taxonomy.
The exhibition's root is the multi-disciplinary project Antimundo, an ongoing series of paintings, drawings and sculptures. Santillán describes it as encompassing that which grows outside Western reality. Antimundo began in 2021 with a lecture and a publication on the Andean 'quipu.' Translated from Quechan as 'knots', quipus consist of networks of ropes and knots used throughout the Andes as recording devices. They encode and transmit numerical values about census and tax records, calendrical and military data, and textual...information; few survived the Spanish destruction.
To 'hack the old normative code', Santillán's works depart from alternative histories and engage technology to do so. In The Andean Information Age, he used a microcomputer to manage an old analogue slide projector. This way, he could control every slide's duration and synchronise it with a spoken word soundtrack that created for this piece. Individual slides show a succession of AI-generated images of imagined quipus superimposed with Santillán's research on their history and potential connections with today's technologies. The result is a sequence of 80 slides synced to audio, allowing this short but pivotal lecture to be given over and over.
Alongside these, the exhibition will include new drawings and sculptures, which envision connections between this form of indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality and 3D modelling.
Entrada actualizada el el 22 feb de 2024
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