These chants are melodies that recount a descent.
Paiján and Paiján EXPRESS present Cantos Matrios by Ingrid Pumayalla (Trujillo, 1989). A research project that traces the latencies of a personal migratory experience and that of the family, from a sound-poetic portrait that includes performance and video installation.
Cantos Matrios is the heart of inherited stories and borrowed voices, allowing us to be part of both an intimate and collective action of registration and emancipation.
These 5 lullaby-like story songs act as an offering, a ritual of mourning and detachment that, by emerging as an ancestral way of transmitting knowledge and memory, reaffirms the tensions between rural and urban contexts; the ghost and the body.
Ingrid Pumayalla grew up in Contumazá, Cajamarca, surrounded by nature and guardian spirits; It is precisely her grandfather’s farm that makes her roots throb.
At age 11, after spending a season between Cascas and Trujillo, she migrates to Lima. A process that, being gradual, reflects on the territorial transit from the northern Andes to a coastal city.
It is also at this time that her mother is elected as a congresswoman for Cajamarca.
Pumayalla recalls having witnessed the political dedication and fierceness of her mother and by having accompanied her in a vigorous and hectic proselytizing campaign, she incorporated a solid referent of woman-power in a mainly masculine milieu.
It is from this brief biographical summary, so anecdotal that relates to a furtive process of formation as an artist, as a daughter and as a woman thus, formulates the materialization of a cardinal element of this project.
The PaijánEXPRESS megaphone aligns itself with certain visual parameters and aesthetic of the political agency and the rally.
As a recognizable and radiating device of discourse, it is as strident as it enables concertation. From now on, what is transferred does not show demagoguery, but the tenderness of the songs.
The bucolic echo is nostalgia crossing the city of Trujillo at dawn, moving from the Mansiche neighborhood, where the artist’s family home is located, to Paiján in the city centre.
Ingrid Pumayalla approaches her photographic practice as a medium that allows her to recognize the reciprocity between the inside and the outside of a body.
In this sense, creating correspondence between two or more elements condenses the artist’s intention to bodily generate new images and mythologies.
The installation in Cantos Matrios is made up of elements taken both from a natural and domestic environment, relocated so that while they question their origin and alienation, they are also assumed as totems or relics protecting a ubiquitous genius loci or spirit of the place.
As in Classical antiquity and frequent in native people of America, such as Mapuche, Aymara and Quechua, the concept of Matria refers to the very land of birth, the roots and unwavering sentiment, in opposition to a determined paternalism of the modern state.
In this sense, Cantos Matrios is a declaration of freedom and a bond of union from the affection to the maternal warmth of the earth.
Gerardo Chávez Maza
Curator of the exhibition — 2021