TO: In that piece I sought to establish a dialogue between several elements: the imaginary of the chronicles of the Indies, various archive photos and a present-day account. In Indios Medievales I was interested on the one hand in reflecting on de Bry's medieval iconography (in which Indians are portrayed on the basis of Europeanized classic models and as cannibal barbarians at the same time). On the other, my intention was to recover archived photographs taken by European scientific missions at the end of the 19th century (whose forms of representation were guided by the racial theories of the time and the physiognomic discourse of "types" through which the natives could be described, classified and subordinated). To these nameless faces I falsely added the names of the leaders of historical indigenous uprisings and a description not in the least bit false of the atrocious ways in which they were executed. Finally, the present-day chronicle consists of a photographic document like a compendium in which I recorded Andean immigrants living in Europe; the register records their faces, names and surnames and a brief personal history.

The result is a pseudo-ethnographic device in which the dates and names of indigenous leaders such as Rumiñahui, Túpac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas and the circumstances of their execution do not correspond to the late 19th century archived photographs. The idea was to distort any supposed documentary objectivity by permitting myself licenses to do away with the notion of a historical source.

JB: The Indios Medievales installation is brought to life through a video re-enactment of one of de Bry's engravings. In it you used Latin American migrants who are participating actively in Spain's informal labor market. How did you devise this re-enactment?

TO: The engraving you're referring to "the original version" is accompanied by a text: "The Indians prompted by anger and envy poured molten gold in the Spaniard's mouths to satiate their greed, then placed them on red-hot coals and ate them". This image and its text are emblematic, and one way or another condense the multiple contradictions in the mediaeval rhetoric that we talked about. More than a re-enactment, the video is an allegorical substitution: confiscating an emblematic instant in order to give the image a new meaning. The fact that the video was made using immigrants of indigenous origin forms part of the allegorical strategy. I think it's significant to have replaced the classical model used by de Bry to depict barbarous, cannibalistic Indians with indigenous workers living in precarious circumstances: domestic maids and construction workers who in a way are present-day serfs. It's also important to add that what is being staged in the video is fundamentally anti-narrative; it's not about reinterpreting, but about perverting an image. If the piece adds new meaning, it lies, as does the historical account, in the arbitrary and contingent nature of the allegory. June 2009.

Note:

* This text was taken from the essay "Extreme Appetites: The coloniality of seeing and archive-images on the cannibalism of the Indies". The text, as well as the interview, are the result of the collaboration between its author Joaquí­n Barriendos and artist Tomás Ochoa.

Quotes:

(1) Jaime Humberto Borja Gómez, Los Indios Medievales de Juan Pedro de Aguado. Construcción del idólatra y escritura de la historia en una crónica del siglo XVI, Bogotá, Universidad Javeriana, 2002.
(2) BARRIENDOS, Joaquí­n, (2009). "Extreme Appetites: The coloniality of seeing and archive-images on the cannibalism of the Indies" in: Translate. Postcolonial Displays, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna.
(3) We use the concept of archive-image to highlight the condensing, catalyzing capacity of certain images, i.e., to emphasize their semiotic function and their porosity as depositaries of other images and representations. Archive-images are thus images formed from multiple representations deposited over one another that provide a certain interpretative integrity and iconic unity. Representations that have some degree of association or kinship with Che Guevara's archive-image, for example, would immediately be inscribed in the bulk of the visual culture generated by Korda's famous photograph, Heroic Guerrilla, and in turn be indebted to a series of cultural imaginaries such as the myth of the Latin American rebel, the idea of a vehemently patriotic-nationalist Bolivarian idealism, the idea of a purity and ideological-revolutionary essence in the Third World, the idea of a social utopia unleashed by the disobedience of certain subordinate groups, the idea of the historical failure of peripheral forms of modernity, etc. Archive-images can therefore be defined as semiotic-social linkage tools, i.e., as instruments that trigger a multitude of underlying imaginaries or complementary iconicities; their usefulness on studying different global visual cultures lies in examining them so as to lead to the interdisciplinary construction of a kind of decolonial, transmodern architecture of what is described in this text as the coloniality of seeing.
(4) Jaime Humberto Borja Gómez, Los Indios Medievales de Juan Pedro de Aguado. Construcción del idólatra y escritura de la historia en una crónica del siglo XVI, Bogotá, Universidad Javeriana, 2002.