Wasi Llamkha (lugar y tacto)
2025
Wasi Llamkha (place and touch) is an installation produced specifically for the south patio of the Centro de Cultura Contemporanea Condeduque in Madrid.
It is an ephemeral architecture. In each of its levels we find surfaces covered with different materials and textures, designed to be touched and experienced with the whole body. The installation combines two mnemonic traditions or practices of artificial memory. On the one hand, it is inspired by the pre-Columbian tradition of ancient Peru, where memory was activated through touch, as in the quipus, whose knots were traversed with the hands. On the other hand, it takes up architecture as a structure for organizing memory, following the tradition of the ars memorativa (known today as the “memory palace”), a method developed in ancient Greece that evolved throughout history until it reached its peak in the Renaissance. The installation is accompanied by a text written by the artist, which proposes a discourse to memorize in relation to each of the levels.
The piece recovers the ars memorativa but replaces the imagined space with a tangible architecture and the visual image with a tactile image. The installation functions as an exercise that invites us to reflect on the relationship between materiality and information and on the integration of alternative forms and knowledge, where the mind/body duality is blurred.
Wasi Llamkha (place and touch) is an installation produced specifically for the south patio of the Centro de Cultura Contemporanea Condeduque in Madrid.
It is an ephemeral architecture. In each of its levels we find surfaces covered with different materials and textures, designed to be touched and experienced with the whole body. The installation combines two mnemonic traditions or practices of artificial memory. On the one hand, it is inspired by the pre-Columbian tradition of ancient Peru, where memory was activated through touch, as in the quipus, whose knots were traversed with the hands. On the other hand, it takes up architecture as a structure for organizing memory, following the tradition of the ars memorativa (known today as the “memory palace”), a method developed in ancient Greece that evolved throughout history until it reached its peak in the Renaissance. The installation is accompanied by a text written by the artist, which proposes a discourse to memorize in relation to each of the levels.
The piece recovers the ars memorativa but replaces the imagined space with a tangible architecture and the visual image with a tactile image. The installation functions as an exercise that invites us to reflect on the relationship between materiality and information and on the integration of alternative forms and knowledge, where the mind/body duality is blurred.