The exhibition paints the portrait of Andean civilization in its entirety.
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Machu Picchu, two words that gallops a dream. The image of a citadel so high perched that she tuties the sky and the gods, so well built that she is only one with the mountain, so distant that we forgot for centuries until his Rediscovered in 1911. Two words so strong that they immediately summon the ghost of the Inca and its golden but fallen empire in our minds. So fascinating that the designers of “Machu Picchu and the treasures of Peru” could not make them otherwise assure them a place of choice in the title of their exhibition which takes its Parisian districts at the City of Architecture and Heritage, after a First step at Boca Raton (Florida).
However, even if the Machu Picchu is inseparable from the Incas, these are little represented in the exhibition, which focuses more on painting the portrait of Andean civilization in its entirety, the only one of the six great civilizations which was created in the southern hemisphere. As Andrés Alvarez Calderon, the president of the Larco museum in Lima, has noted, who lent the majority of the exhibited objects, “the Incas, it is only the last two hundred years of a multi-millennial civilization”.
We must therefore familiarize yourself with less famous societies, Chavin, Nazca, Mochica, Huari, Chimu, to which we should add a string of even less known names – vicus, cupisnic, Salinar, Tiahuanaco, Lambayeque, Chachapoyas and D ‘ still others. This profusion could suggest to a great cultural heterogeneity but it is nothing: despite the vast expanse both temporal and geographic, the diversity of the environments in which these peoples lived (Côtes du Pacific, Andean valleys, highlands, forest Amazonian), large are the permanence and coherence of their symbolic universe. As summarized by the exhibition co-commissioner, Carole Fraresso, specialist in pre-Columbian goldsmithery and associate researcher at the Larco museum, the objective is to give visitors “the keys to understand how the world was perceived” by the different Ancient cultures of Peru.
“Cosmovision”
The works presented are often breathtaking, sometimes sublime of beauty. But that should not hide the message they convey. Because, in these societies without writing, the form and the image are the receptacles of a whole mythology and, beyond, of what the exhibition calls a “cosmovision”, a symbolic representation of the universe and the forces which Animate it. We must therefore learn to read these objects which, in addition to their ceremonial function, also served as communication tools.
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