Choir of the Warmi Pachakuti
Performance, 2024
Warmi Pachakuti is an invocation of the Aymara and Quechua warmis, a call for the new and revolutionary time organized for those who take care of Life in the community. I was invited to do a lecture performance at Gather Symposium Berlin. In this performance, I collaborated with the performance artist Sonqo Ruro, re-creating a Pachakuti myth where the bodies of the warmis, whose lives were taken and scattered in pieces in the struggle for the body and the territory, are re-uniting under the Earth in a great collective body. When the Warmi Pachakuti collective body is re-united it will regain its power and the new time, the time of the revolution will begin.
We weaved a choir of collective curses from within the heart of colonial-continuation institutions that call themselves ‘art’ academies. We had collected quotes from over 60 revolutionary figures, caretakers of Life in the past and present, as well as named their territories, from Panshin Beka to Sylvia Rivera. We asked the audience to join us, to read their quotes and give their breath into the microphone in exchange, to bury the dying heart of the empire, to disseminate new seeds over it, and to call the spirits and the words of our Warmi Pachakuti ancestors, through letting their words pass through our tongues and our bodies in the present. We collectively processed their resistance in our bodies, and continue with our presence into a long journey of screaming for the fall of the empire.
This participative performance is a continuation of a research project started by Sonqo Ruro and Lola Estrada Francke in 2021, archiving revolutionary anti-colonial figures throughout history towards a Warmi Pachakuti futurism.