De Huacas y Huaqueros

De Huacas y Huaqueros, 2024

09:36, Video installation

‘Re-collections’ at the Latinx Project at New York University

Curated by Daniel Arturo Almeida.

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