Tin Ayala

Huacos

Huacos transforms precolonial Andean ceramics into objects of transculturation and cultural tension. Produced in different regions of the Andes before Spanish colonization, these ceramics—created by societies such as the Moche, Nazca, Chimú, and Inca—bear witness to complex relationships between humans, territories, and non-human entities.

In 2023, a research residency at the Larco Archaeological Museum in Lima provided access to one of the most significant collections of precolonial Andean ceramics. This context made it possible to observe how these objects materialize a way of inhabiting the world grounded in reciprocity and interdependence with the environment. Rather than attempting to restore an idealized precolonial past, the project explores possible continuities and cultural superimpositions emerging from the colonial historical rupture.

Within this framework, ceramics operate as sites of translation between different temporalities.
The project consists of a series of speculative archaeological bottles that place ancient huacos in dialogue with contemporary pop culture. This encounter reveals how ancestral and globalized imaginaries—often conceived as opposites—can coexist and interact. Through these hybridizations, the work questions colonial binarisms such as ancestral and contemporary, local and global, or nature and culture. The objects thus function as sites of tension and cultural abigarramiento, where heterogeneous temporalities and epistemologies overlap.

The project was developed during the Fondation d’entreprise Martell residency in Cognac between November 2025 and January 2026