Curatorial Text
Lambayeque: Layers of Memory
Huacas de Lambayeque takes the visitor on a journey through the landscape, the memory, and the pre-Inca cultures of the northern coast of Peru.
Long before the expansion of the Inca Empire, this region was home to complex and highly developed societies. The Moche culture serves as an important point of reference in this regard: after its decline, elements of its knowledge, artistic traditions, and ritual practices continued to live on and develop within later cultures. In this context, the Sicán or Lambayeque culture emerged, which developed its own political, religious, and artistic identity while simultaneously maintaining a profound connection to the land and the territory.
The huacas, large monumental complexes constructed primarily of adobe, are among the most impressive testimonies of this past. As places of ceremonial, political, and funerary significance, they continue to shape the region's landscape to this day. Through the effects of time and erosion, their forms seem to gradually merge with the desert, blurring the boundary between architecture and nature.
Billy Hare's black-and-white photography forms the visual starting point of the exhibition and depicts these structures as silent presences, hovering between memory and transformation.
Gallery Intussen’s installation extends this landscape into the exhibition space. Drawings of the huacas move across the walls, while forms and iconographic references evoke the symbolic world of the ancient cultures of Northern Peru, in which natural elements, animals, ritual practices, and representations of the sacred were closely intertwined. The presence of the Marinera dress adds a contemporary dimension and creates a dialogue between archaeological heritage and today’s cultural identity.
In this way, the exhibition brings different historical periods into dialogue with one another without mixing them. This reveals Lambayeque as the result of a long process of cultural layering. Through photography, drawing, installation, and material culture, the exhibition aims to draw attention to a history that is still relatively little known outside Peru: that of the great civilizations that inhabited this region before the Incas and left behind a heritage that, to this day, bears witness to their complexity, creativity, and cultural richness.
Curatorship: Jessica de Facci
Artistic Direction: Jason Ayala Pacheco
