Issue # 14 Maximiliano Siñani

Curated by: Marisabel Villagómez

Apacheta no. 6

Enacting the Andean Garden

We, the residents of La Paz, who enter the space of the city, whether from El Alto or its most central areas, focus our gaze on the Illimani mountain with fascination. It is a landmark for the modern architectural landscape of the city and, therefore, of the citizens of La Paz. The cosmopolitanism of this city implies being able to sit in a viewpoint or city square and to extend our being towards the sublime peaks of that mountain.

This magnetizing relationship of the urban proposal of the city was, we suspect, preceded by a pre-modern knowledge that worshiped the huacas, or sites of veneration. On the map of the indigenous context, the Illimani must have been for sure one of the most revered sites. It is the last snow-capped mountain in the south of the Cordillera Real, distinguishable by its three peaks, in the heart of the Kollasuyo. We know less about this because of the extirpation of idolatries that did not allow, during the colonial times, the worshiping of the powers of Andean garden that it represented.

Such interactions with landscape are added, on a mountain in the city of La Paz: on the one hand, the vertigo caused by the sublime of the modern construction and, on the other, the power of Andean veneration. Perhaps this combination of elements has made it possible to propose that mountain as the favorite subject of our great painters, photographers, visitors, explorers from the end of the colonial times until today. The amount of representations that we have of the mountain view are innumerable. In a lucky incantation, the mountain tells us to "look (admire), but don't touch it".

The work of Maximiliano Siñani has the virtue of touching the mountain. Contrary to his predecessors, Siñani and the artists who accompanied the Illimani in Situ project, proposed this approach as the starting point to achieve a continuum of reflections that were triggered and continue to be triggered by climbing the mountain in their own flesh.  Siñani uses this climb to solve a family ritual, it is a fiussian Apacheta, an offering for the mountain and the deity of the place, that he also dedicates to his great-uncle. It is believed that one of the most important axes of Aymara religiosity is their ancestors’ veneration. Max equates Pachamama and family, and thus proposes a representation of a localized landscape where he hopes to reestablish the links of location of explorers, visitors, admirers, and the nature that we also venerate. Those who pass through this part of the gigantic mountain will once again find themselves in the immensity of the last snow-capped mountain of the Cordillera Real and the feeling of paying respect to a family from the Kollasuyo.

Marisabel Villagómez (La Paz, 1976), graduated from Georgetown University with Postgraduate studies in contemporary Latin American History. She specialized in  patrimony on Cultural Landscapes, proposing the coca leaf as one at FAO in 2019.

 She has worked as a curator and collaborator of Materia Gris in La Paz since 2014, collaboration which was awarded by the Spanish Cooperation for the best curatorial text in the Akana 2016 contest. She proposed Illimani In Situ, a collective consisting of 14 contemporary artists working in the iconic mountain of La Paz, at the end of 2018 which was exhibited on December 2019 at Centro de la Revolución Cultural de la Fundación Cultural del Banco Central de Bolivia. In 2020 she became the foundation director.