Wayqeycuna at PuSh International Performing Arts Festival

Like a quipu—the intricate system of knotted cords used by Andean peoples to record memory and knowledge—Wayqeycuna traces Argentinean artist Tiziano Cruz’s path back to his childhood in the Andean north. Through a poetic layering of testimony, ritual, and performance, Cruz reassembles fragments of collective and personal history, each knot an invocation of ancestry, each gesture a measured rebellion against erasure. Drawing from archival research and community memory, the work reflects on the violent devastation of cultural and communal life under neoliberalism and enduring racial hierarchies. 

As the final piece in Cruz’s trilogy Tres Maneras de Cantarle a una Montaña (Three Ways of Singing to a Mountain), which includes Soliloquio (I woke up and hit my head against the wall) presented at the 2023 PuSh Festival, Wayqeycuna unfolds as an act of return and repair: a lament for what has been taken, and a celebration of what persists.