“As reflection on the water, you are illusion
As reflection of the lymph, you are appearance,
When I think of your smiling eyes, I am in awe
When I think of your playful eyes, I fall ill”
“Unuy rirpu llullam kanki
Yakuy rirpu pallqum kanki
Chay asiq nawily kita yuyarispa ulinipuni
Chay pukllay nawily kita yuyarispa
unquyman chayani”
For the lastest iteration of the Ballade of the Q’aquchas Vega Macotela created characters by using the makehuman software, to then print their skin and features on cow leather (an animal brought from Europe). The prints were produced using steganography, a digital technique that allows information to be hidden within an image. The artist, with the help of hackers, encrypted one of the few poems that remain in Quechua - one of the indigenous languages spoken in Bolivia before the conquest, written by the Andean poet Guaman Poma:
The altarpieces of Vega Macotela must be seen from the front and the back. The action of opening and closing the altarpiece is conceptually full of meaning- since, once opened, they are no longer an object, they’re an image. On the backside, we can see the depiction of landscapes on red cedar wood, where the geographical reliefs of the six most exploited mines in the world today: Uyuni, Baayan Obo, Bacadehuachi, Kalonge, Lubumbashi and Potosí. All located in Africa and Latin-America, and exploited for their minerals, which are used by the tech industry: cobalt, lithium, coltan, rare minerals, etc. This is how the “digital world” is built from physical elements which are used by some of the largest multinational corporations to build computers, batteries, screens, circuits, processors, etc. Objects though which we consume parallel digitalized realities such as apps, social networks, or even the theatrics of the metaverse.
The altarpieces of Vega Macotela must be seen from the front and the back. The action of opening and closing the altarpiece is conceptually full of meaning- since, once opened, they are no longer an object, they’re an image. On the backside, we can see the depiction of landscapes on red cedar wood, where the geographical reliefs of the six most exploited mines in the world today: Uyuni, Baayan Obo, Bacadehuachi, Kalonge, Lubumbashi and Potosí. All located in Africa and Latin-America, and exploited for their minerals, which are used by the tech industry: cobalt, lithium, coltan, rare minerals, etc. This is how the “digital world” is built from physical elements which are used by some of the largest multinational corporations to build computers, batteries, screens, circuits, processors, etc. Objects though which we consume parallel digitalized realities such as apps, social networks, or even the theatrics of the metaverse.