Spring/Break 2021: La Guaca

Curated by Nadia Tahoun
Art by Cesar Kastro
Music: Under Glass, Birds Sing by Daniel Tahoun

Featuring sculptures and paintings inspired by Pre-Hispanic objects, accessed using national museums’ databases and private auction houses across the United States, artist Cesar Kastro presents “La Guaca”, a space of protection or heresy depending on who you ask. Kastro works from decolonial remembrance and considers his process as blood memory. If museums exist ‘at the expense of and as a substitute for destroyed worlds’ as renowned theorist Ariella Azoulay writes in Unlearning Imperialism then that means when you go to a museum, the experience creates the illusion that you are seeing the best samples of civilization; this illusion is an example of Imperialist domination that persists to this day. La Guaca challenges views held in the Western and European gaze by offering an Indigenous perspective. Two canine-like sculptures sit in the room opposite each other. One is named Alqo and sits on a large pedestal and the other Alqocha and sits on a pile of soil. The names are in reference to the Quechan word Alqo which means canine. These canine protectors sit watching. Masks adorn one of the walls with broad leaves covering half of their face, they are watching the canines and those that interact with them. On the opposite wall are tropical fauna and flowers that seem to be covering something while using the mysticism of the natural world as protection. They are calling on their visitors to pluck the flowers and fauna and offer it to Alqo, the guardian of the room.

Lastly, there is a wall with one large painting on a wooden panel that combines Medieval Catholic Art elements and Pre-Hispanic anthropomorphism offering a mesh of two empires. During the end of the Middle Ages, the Incan Empire was at its most powerful and the powers of Western Europe were starting their journeys West, to “The New World”. All of the pieces Kastro makes are derived from objects that were violently separated from the Indigenous communities that created them and are currently being interpreted through materials Kastro knows well: materials of strength, materials of empire. “La Guaca'' gives meaning to these objects beyond the past they occupy, and empowers them to carry the tradition and preserve communities and their cultures; in essence, Kastro is protecting that which used to protect his ancestors. “La Guaca '' is a reminder that even with Imperial violence and the colonization of Abya Yala (“The New World”) these objects were and are of spiritual and worldly importance and what is more heretic than reminding the Global North that you still exist, despite their efforts?