Testimonies and altarpieces: migrant boxes, narrative urgencies, the Andean space. A reading of Chungui. Violencia y trazos de memoria by Edilberto Jiménez

Abstract

Throughout time, altarpieces have suffered transformations which were recorded, in part, by the Arguedian ethnographic writing: thus, from mobile boxes related to religious motifs, travels, and cattle driving, altarpieces mutated into commercial and popular art objects, by incorporating the ritual and the daily life of the Andean communities during the modernization of the nation. Then, they turned into coffin boxes, and music boxes which portrayed the horror and the political violence in the recent Perú (Ulfe, 2011). In particular, I will focus on Chungui. Violencia y trazos de memoria (2005), by Edilberto Jiménez: there, this Peruvian altarpiece artist and anthropologist re-updates the canonical forms of the altarpiece and the ethnographic testimony by combining letter and image, voice and body to narrate the unspeakable in the armed conflict. The procedural and conceptual transformations, while reminiscent of the work of Guamán Poma, refer to an Andean space which is clearly symbolic. In this sense, I propose to think of this case as a residual, migrant and performative testimony.