DE HUACAS Y HUAQUEROS - LADRILLOS 2024

These ‘Ladrillos’ (blocks) are part of the video installation De Huacas y Huaqueros, which was first exhibited at The Latinx Project Museum at New York University, as part of ‘Re-collections’, an exhibit curated by Daniel Arturo Almeida.

PRESS

Installation view: “Dos Cuerpos <Between Cyborg and Spirit>'“ at Laundromat Art Space, Little Haiti, May 11 - June 8, 2024. Photo by Claudio Marcotulli

Intsallation view: “Immaterial,” at Collective62 Miami, January 31 - March 22, 2025. Photo by Logan Frazier.

Roxana Barba's video installation, De Huacas y Huaqueros, foregrounds the excavation and contraband of pre-Columbian artifacts ranging from gold, textiles, jewelry and ceramics. Among these are earthen vessels known as huacos, linked to ceremonial and everyday life uses. The term "huaquero" is used in Peru to describe those who dig into Peruvian soil searching for extant huacos and valuables. Huaqueros work under deplorable and often life-threatening conditions in hopes of cashing a modest profit by selling their bounty to a third party, who later resells the artifacts on the Pre-Columbian antiquities market for thousands of dollars. A vast number of items sold through auction houses lack recorded provenance, accentuating the looting of the Andean country's cultural heritage. Despite Peruvian laws prohibiting extraction of antique pieces, Huaqueo persists and has been ingrained as a pipedream to escape poverty.

Barba's video installation uses the body "to carve out archaeological desires," commenting on the decontextualization and commodification of Indigenous sacred rituals and offerings. De Huacas y Huaqueros is an extension of her multimedia stage performance, Apuntes Americanos (2022), exploring the origins of Eurocentric views of ancestral Peru, with a focus on skewed accounts by 19th-century French explorers. Barba exposes systems behind the legitimized roles of cultural institutions and the dubious origins of ethnographic scholarship.

-Daniel Arturo Almeida, Curator