Critical reading of narratives
by Eric Gallardo

PAC - Prácticas Artísticas Contemporáneas FOTX, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Graduation year: 2022

portfolio special mention call 'BLURRING THE LINES 2022', 2022

Much of my childhood was shared between Lima and Supe, which as is known is located thirty minutes by car near to the Sacred City of Caral. The truth is that I was very little interested in the production of utilitarian, sumptuary or funerary objects until I started working as an artist, so most of the time I had spent in Supe was living usual daily life of a rural area. For 2015, which was the year I decided to do my master's degree, I had no better idea than to return to Supe to put some of my future proposals into practice. In the following years I would witness the urban sprawl in addition to other activities that contributed to the research for this publication. I went from investing many hours of work in improvised brickyards to frequently visiting lagoons that were farmlands dropped due to uncontrolled ditches. Already in 2017 I had notes and ideas that became more and more present, and it was not until a particular event that I realized I had lived all my life in territories occupied by pre-Columbian cultures. The story is as follows: During a trekk with José along a path full of rocks in Santa Elena, he told me that past moths he founds a little clay pieces that possibly belonged to a local huaquería, and even a spondylus. His story caught my attention and I invited him to tried it. It was then that without overthinking he dug under a huge rock and found one. After a few hours along the same path, and hearing his story, we reached a rocky hill that he assured was an archaeological site. I had no idea what we would find, but I trusted José's passivity because everything indicated that he had been there before. Come look, there are some gaps here, he said. To me some had aspects of tambos, but they did not correspond cause this were below ground level. Apparently it was an area that was being looted and no local or regional authority was present to stop it. Each of these holes was a structure of a particular masonry that after observing some others we agree that they were covered by rocks to hid them in the ground. This visit happened during the summer and José suggested to return during the winter. It is pretty much more attractive because the landscape changes, he said. Some months later we would return and the place had taken on an enveloping greenery and since first we had a hard time finding the excavations. It didn't take long to also notice that in addition to us, local ranchers grazed the site during that season also. At this moment nothing gave signs that this was an archaeological looted site, so we could go frequently without any complications. I stopped going to Supe for work reasons and was only able to return months after the pandemic began. I went all the necessary gear willing to investigate more about it. At that time José was working as a topographer and when we met he told me that he had found another looted site. It was in Caleta Vidal, a district near to the beach that I used to go in summer. A desert hill with holes confronted us that afternoon. Here everything got out of control, we concluded; while between a ruined factory, a community graveyard and a fishermen's route, we saw bones and vessels scattered all over the place. Sharing images with friends and neighbors, over time the site recovered security guards, however, I continued visiting the place and I have always founded new excavations. Like other archaeological sites in Peru, in addition to looting, government also face the traffic of protected land despite their historical value. This work is part of a group of proposals and ideas that wants to make visible the irreversible loss of knowledge of peoples who also occupied this territory. *The word huaquería refers to the looting of archaeological sites with pre-Columbian cultural heritage with an extensive record of trafficking in ceramic and textile pieces in different regions of America and the world. **Tambo from Quechua tanpu means temporary accommodation or storage. ***The Spondylus is a mollusk of great importance in the interaction of different native peoples. ****The District of Supe is located at Km. 188 of the Panamericana Norte.


share this page