“Aesthetics of poverty” aims to explore the subordinated position that Indigenous peoples occupy in contemporary photography. I am interested in exposing the mechanisms through which historical heritage operates simultaneously as emancipatory resistance and neo-colonial oppression. Specifically, I will attempt to challenge the binary logic traditional/modern by which an indigenous person is portrayed as uncivilized and modernity’s other. Being an indigenous woman, I live this contradiction in a daily basis.
I will work with perhaps one of the most celebrated markers of ‘authentic’ indigeneity in the Andean Region: textiles/costumes. I am interested in situating these items as an integral part the experience of modernity as most of indigenous clothing are increasingly mass produced by the global garment industry.
Through a Google Image search, I have been collecting images that are repetitive under the words “Indigenous Andes”. I will classify this archive and connect it with different layers of personal and collective experiences of memory, trauma and displacement from my family’s history and my community in Bolivia. Then I will use Indigenous textiles to re-enact those moments and insert them into emblematic sites of ‘modernist’ architecture in Europe (e.g. South bank). I will perform this move to claim our participation in building the edifice of modernity. Yet this is no apologia. Our ‘integration’ into the modern world has taken place in exploitative terms.