From the Andes to Amsterdam: the artist reimagining indigenous cultures

In 2022, while doing research in a Latin American archive in Texas, the Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay came across a curious musical score. Titled Hanaqpachap kusikuynin, it was a Catholic hymn, thought to be the oldest polyphonic work in Quechua (the group of indigenous languages spoken across the Andes). It was first published in 1631 in a monumental ecclesiastical tome compiled by a Franciscan clergyman. Martínez Garay set about learning to play it on the synthesiser.

The anonymous priests who wrote it had opted for Quechua so, as Martínez Garay puts it, “they could speak to the people”. She noted the way the lyrics adapt Catholicism into Andean cosmovision, a foundational body of myths, rituals, cultural expressions and perspectives on life that differs fundamentally from western worldviews. For example, in the Quechuan lyrics, the Virgin Mary becomes a mountain. “Religion was, of course, a horrible colonial process,” she says, “but it is also a very important part of celebrations within Andean cultures now.”

Mixedness and simultaneity – the necessity of holding multiple points of view at once – are central to Martínez Garay’s work. That reworked hymn features prominently in the soundscape she composed for an animation titled Ayataki (“song for the dead”), one of the works on show at the artist’s solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA).

Martínez Garay makes the kind of variegated, detailed art you want to explore like you would a map. Her mediums (sculpture, tufting, collage, printmaking, animation, installation and sound) are as wide-ranging as her references (Moche craftsmanship, El Niño, Nazca trepanation, Covid devastation, colonial chronicles, contemporary warfare). She also has a distinct knack for a weird shape (a pair of chicken feet appended to an upright U; aimless worm-like tubes on sticks) or the unexpected (a loo roll).

She takes the show’s title, Every Seed Is Awakened, from an address the erstwhile Sioux leader Tatanka Yotanka, AKA Sitting Bull, gave in 1877 to a Powder River council of elders. The warrior’s sentiments, as he enjoined his listeners to herald the advent of spring and fight for their rights, chime with her thoughts about the land. “Different people were colonising,” she says, “but the experiences are very shared.”

Martínez Garay was born in 1983, in Ayacucho, a mountain city to the south-east of Lima. Her Quechuan grandparents came from Ancash, farther to the north. When the war broke out in 1980 between the Marxist Shining Path guerrilla group and Peruvian armed forces, Indigenous communities were caught in the fray and severely targeted. Mass graves are still being discovered.

Between the ages of one and two (she isn’t sure exactly) Martínez Garay was adopted and brought up thereafter in Lima – speaking Spanish. In recent years, she has been relearning her native tongue, which her grandmothers had not passed on to their children for fear they would not succeed in urban life: “There are many things I don’t know about myself. It’s like when you’re seeing a picture and you’re trying to figure out who these people are and who is missing.”

Today, talking about the war is still taboo for many people. It wasn’t until Martínez Garay moved to the Netherlands in 2016, to do a residency at Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie art school, that she felt free to speak about where she comes from. Constant references made to Dutch old masters, meanwhile, left her wondering who their Peruvian counterparts might have been.

Martínez Garay often opts for rhizomes or mind maps as compositional tools. She cleaves to the Andean concept of chawpi: “this notion of the hidden relation between two things that are meant to be opposite. That thing that you don’t show, or you don’t say, is what is holding or making the bridge between the opposites. It speaks to the duality I feel within myself, the elements of white cultural upbringing and the brown Andean traditions that my family was able to keep.”

Four more pieces from the exhibition

Ayataki, 2022
This animation operates as a lament for the Andean landscape and those who did not survive the war. Burning structures and disassembled dwellings are shrouded in mist or lit with a mysterious glow. In the accompanying soundscape, voices talk of streets turning into graves, interwoven with fragments of folk music, radio propaganda, documentary recording and Martínez Garay’s reworking of a Quechuan hymn.

Chunka Iskayniyuq Pacha, 2022
This ongoing series of 2.5m tuftings references historical engravings and imagery from colonial chronicles to explore the Quechuan concept of “pacha”, the indivisible unity of time and space. Here, a body is exhumed by looters and a vicuña is to be sacrificed under a diagram of the phases of the moon.

Chunka Tawayuq Pacha, 2022
The Andean carnival tradition of yunza sees people place all manner of cheap objects in a “very thin tree” then dance around it before chopping it down with an axe. Martínez Garay’s yunza features a cantuta flower (an embattled national emblem), a well-known brand of toilet paper (symbolising the panic of Covid lockdowns) and the cinchona plant (exploited by colonial powers for its antimalarial properties).

Untitled work in progress, 2024 (detail)
This newly commissioned 7.5m-long mural centres on the figure of a naked woman hanging from her feet. It references a colonial chronicle describing how women who “misbehaved” were punished. “I’ve been reading a lot of scholarship, from people like Argentinian anthropologist Rita Laura Segato, on what a more equitable future for women could be,” says Martínez Garay.

¡Kachkaniraqkun! ¡Somos aún! ¡We are, still!, 2018 (main image)
In building this early work, reconfigured at DCA against a diluted red-clay background on a slightly raised plinth, Martínez Garay was thinking about all the cultures, ideologies and mindsets that have been imposed on Peruvian lands: “I wanted them to all be floating together, these layers of different temporalities.”

Claudia Martínez Garay: Every Seed Is Awakened is at Dundee Contemporary Arts to 17 November.