Las Ruínas Circulares

(The Circular Ruins)

Commissioned for the 14th Cuenca Biennial, Las Ruinas Circulares is a sculpture and an archive set up inside a local bus. Parked in the back of Museo Pumapungo, which is also an archeological site of Pre-Columbian ruins, the crossed and set in motion two sets of collections: construction stones from the museum collection (ranging from Cañari and Inca culture, colonial period and contemporary rubble) and a section of my own archive of newspaper images, featuring every kind of ruin (from earthquakes to protest barricades).

Thus, the bus became a sort of precarious archaeological museum, where ruins from the past are confronted with ruins from the present. If we are testifying the end of the “world”, nothing better than ask for help for those whose world never stopped ending: since colonization the native world of the Americas is living under a cultural apocalypse.

The stones were carefully displayed and displaced at the position of passengers: of subjects in motion, as circulating, fleeing ruins from catastrophe.

Under the driver’s seat a wishing well was carved.