Tin Ayala

Pokemons Précolombiens
Pokemons Précolombiens takes as its starting point pre-colonial Andean ceramics, produced across various regions of the Andean cordillera prior to Spanish colonisation. These objects, originating from societies such as the Moche, Nazca, Chimú, and Inca, bear witness to close relationships between humans, territories, and non-humans. They are considered here not as fixed remnants, but as critical objects capable of questioning colonial legacies.
In 2023, during a research period at the Larco Archaeological Museum in Lima, Tin Ayala gained access to one of the most significant collections of Andean ceramics. This immersion allowed them to observe how these objects materialise a way of inhabiting the world founded on reciprocity and interdependence with the environment. Spanish colonisation interrupted numerous forms of knowledge, practices, and symbolic systems, imposing an extractivist vision grounded in the separation of nature and culture. In the face of this rupture, Pokemons Précolombiens does not seek to restore an idealised past, but to imagine possible extensions and cultural superimpositions. The ceramics thus become supports for translation between different temporalities.
The project is a series of speculative archaeological bottles placing ancient huacos in dialogue with the universe of contemporary pop culture, particularly Pokémon. This encounter reveals the way in which ancestral and globalised imaginaries coexist today. Through these hybridisations, the project interrogates colonial binarisms ; ancestral and contemporary, local and global, nature and culture ; and proposes objects as sites of tension and cultural abigarramiento.
Developed during the Fondation d’entreprise Martell residency in Cognac between November 2025 and January 2026.