Micaela de Vivero

Qhapaq Ñan. 

By Joy Sperling

Ceres Gallery is pleased to present Qhapaq Ñan.  Micaela de Vivero’s art is never simple, never unidimensional, never a finished thing, and never to be underestimated.  Your participation, in fact, is critical to the way in which its meaning grows and expands. Vivero asks us to think about how meaning is made across the vagaries of oceans, centuries, belief systems, colonial powers, materials, and even systems of communication. Vivero’s art is deeply informed by the strand of decolonial thought that suggests the only positive way to repair societies fundamentally damaged by colonialism is to ‘delink’ them from the colonial paradigm and to reassess pre-colonial culture on its own terms. Rather than simply negating the colonial matrices of power, decolonial thought is the essential frame for recognizing colonial social, political, cultural, and religious impositions as co-optation or subjugation strategies that alter targeted cultures, sometimes irrevocably; it accordingly concludes that repair is difficult, transcultural, and complex. These refrains are threaded, sometimes quite literally, throughout Vivero’s work, in this case in the form of Inkan khipus and tocapus.

For this exhibition, Vivero has focused on two intricate Inkan forms of material communication, khipus and tocapus, as source material for her work. Both khipus and tocapus functioned in Inkan imperial culture to uphold and maintain the complex structures of power and order. Their deeply embedded visual codes depended wholly on specific bodies of very precise cultural and intellectual knowledge, and the recursive impact of those codes at very specific times, places, and in very particular contexts. The original meanings of these objects in their time and place can no longer be reconstructed. Very few survive, most were hidden, lost, or destroyed after colonization by the Spanish, but a few were transported to Europe where they gained new meaning as imperial trophies or treasures. There is one such treasure, the imperial tunic held by Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, on which Vivero bases her tocapus, have been reclaimed today by Andean peoples in many forms of reproduction, along with a cluster of new national meanings.  

Micaela de Vivero’s installation is a subtle and sophisticated commentary on the life, the significance, and the power of images, objects, places, and on ways in which both dominant and subversive forms of visuality can correspond, can converse, and can create a productive new discourse, especially when they meet in diplomatic congress. Her art is as complex and ineffable as it and its khipus and tocapus are beautiful. 

Text by Joy Sperling

Micaela de Vivero

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