Some Words
At the heart of Proyecto Checán is “Checán Estéreo,” a sound installation/interactive altar designed by Huanchaco to communicate with ancestors through the Muchik language (Mochica language). This device was built using a recording of the last person who spoke Muchik, capturing 53 words from that extinct language, which disappeared in the early 20th century. Huanchaco recovers these words and assigns them to a button console, allowing the apparatus to activate and combine vocabulary to generate new phrases and sounds.
The main goal of this installation is to return a voice to a series of portrait huacos—Mochica ceramic vessels with human faces —which are now decontextualized (and likely distressed) in museums and private collections across Peru and the world.
By pressing the console’s buttons, the public—or the artist himself—“greet” the huacos with simple phrases in Muchik—such as “good morning” or “have your chicha”—establishing a new relationship with these ancestral objects. “Huacos have been thought of as objects, but they are beings. They represent a power, an energy. We must reflect on the position from which we connect with them,” explains Huanchaco. This statement encapsulates the concept: to humanize or reanimate pre-Columbian pieces through language and sound, inviting us to rethink our connection with the Indigenous past.
In this way, Huanchaco transforms the ceramics into more than archaeological artifacts: he stops treating them as museological “fetishes” and acknowledges their ancestral agency, that is, a living presence capable of symbolically interacting with us. The Checán Estéreo device acts as a technological-ritual bridge between times and cultures. Each device in the room supports lamps evoking the sun’s cycle (sunset), integrating technology within a ceremonial context. Visually, the installation blends elements of archaeology and technology, using 3D prints, methacrylate, speakers, and electronic circuits embedded in a structure that evokes both an experimental lab and a sound altar. The space is completed by a series of paintings on paper that act as diagrams of the project, illustrating the relationship between the huacos, the Muchik language, and the possibilities of transhistorical communication.
The project questions Western epistemology and how it has treated Andean cultural objects, creating a space that is both playful and critical, encouraging reflection on the interaction between Western knowledge systems and their non-Western objects of study.
In other words, the exhibition seeks to reimagine the relationship with pre-Hispanic cultures, recognizing the blending of temporalities and discarding the notion of an untouched ancestral purity.