NEVER LET THE NIGHT COME
In their film Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter, siblings Chuquimamani-Condori (Elysia Crampton Chuquimia) and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – both members of the Indigenous Aymara nation of the northern Andes – enact a ceremony for their late grandmother Flora Tancara Quiñonez Chuquimia. Shot on voltaic 8mm film which amplifies the film’s entangling of past and present in its eerie anachronism and soundtracked by Joshua’s low-fi guitar drones, Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter follows a silicone-figure made in Flora’s likeness as she is met by a dog, a condor and a hummingbird, central figures in the Aymaran conception of the transition to death. Woven within this sequence are fragments of oral history detailing stories of Aymaran cosmology and resistance through the ages, including those relayed by the artists’ own grandparents, who struggled against the hacienda system of land holdings implemented in Bolivia in the 1950s, under which Aymarans were enslaved as agricultural workers. Mourning here functions as a political act which restores the ongoing and open relationship with the past that is severed by colonialism, which Chuquimamani-Condori in a lecture given at London’s Auto Italia on the occasion of the work’s display defined as not just as an historical event, but an “active structure” that “distorts and seeks to destroy Indigenous forms of relation ... separating us from we via language, religion, law”. Chuquimamani-Condori likens the persistence of these distorted lifeways to psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms’ notion of non-declarative memories, which are remembered only through affect and enacted repetition rather than conscious knowledge. Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter restages and reinstates these compromised forms of relation, giving form to forcefully repressed histories that, while unspoken, remain intact. ◉
Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter is on show at Auto Italia from 24 September to 5 December 2021.
Images and text from Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter, 2021. Courtesy the artists and Auto Italia, London
Somos janiwa, we are No.
And they said many times, well, the fiestas, the ceremonies are images of the true ceremony...
From the darkness of eternal night, weaving twilight, weaving red through the heat of their voices, they say the ancestors were dancing, singing: Desnudito, never let the light come /Desnudito, never let the day arrive. Because they knew the approaching sunrise brought the mundo en policia (the policed world).
Listen, the word for supay, the ancestral ghost we say was born woman, became their word for devil. So that in order to speak with our ancestors, we would have to talk to the devil. And Bartolome Alvarez wrote: when these Indians get old, they say, “ya soy supay”, now we’re supay. And so we also became devil, because we’re inseparable.
