Carlos Jacanamijoy: Ambi Yaku
“Quechua is a very sweet language. Perhaps I feel this way because it is my ancestral mother tongue in danger of extinction, and because I feel nostalgic about being part of a culture with an ancient language, silenced, forgotten, invisible, and because I feel at the same time that we are all losing, and by all I mean humanity, another language that will be lost. Its sound opens a portal of memories deeply immersed in the nature that saw me grow up and that I saw as I grew up.
The title of this exhibition of paintings, Ambi yaku, suddenly sprang forth in the middle of a painting session, in the same way that water is born, in the same way that the paint flowed onto the canvases, it came out of the silence of the painting workshop sessions as color, or as a revelation or a synchronicity in a dialogue with the past that I maintain with this ancient language, which reminds me, for example, how the Ingas heal bodies by bathing them with leaves from the rainbow tree that grows on the riverbank, or combat babies' fear by giving them the foam from the waterfalls to drink.”
Carlos Jacanamijoy
