CONVERSATIONS: CHUQUIMAMANI-CONDORI

Ormai un anno fa, ospiti da RBL all’Imbarchino, con il Po sullo sfondo di un pomeriggio straordinariamente caldo di ottobre, abbiamo fatto delle domande a Chuquimamani-Condori prima del suo estatico live da COMBO. Ne è uscita un’intervista psichedelica, che tocca i temi cruciali del lavoro dell’artista (il paesaggio, la collaborazione, l’amatorialità, il world building) passando senza soluzione di continuità attraverso fisica quantistica e cosmologia aymara. Questa trascrizione è una versione rielaborata dell’intervista integrale che potete trovare qui, dove tra una domanda e l’altra Chuquimamani ci delizia con una selezione di brani che hanno ispirato il suo ultimo album  “DJ E”. Peccato non rimanga traccia dei fuori onda sulla storia oscura della Lambada.

La pubblichiamo oggi in occasione del Leone d’Argento ricevuto da Chuquimamani Condori alla Biennale Musica di Venezia, che verrà consegnato il 12 ottobre: un riconoscimento che ci dà il pretesto migliore per condividere ora questo incontro, che trovare in fondo alla pagina dopo la trascrizione integrale della conversazione.

Ph. cover James W. Catrozzi
Ph. @staccatop5.js!

Mattia
It’s been so nice to be here, I’m really honored – even if I’m a bit shy. Just before, at the bar, you were asking us what defines Torinese music for us. I’d like to turn the same question back to you.
In your early works as Elijah Crampton, such as American Drift or the Moth Lake EP, you made very explicit connections with the natural landscape of Virginia and its history. Later on, those references became less direct, yet a sense of belonging to a landscape remains strongly present in your work. So my question is: how have the landscapes you’ve crossed since then influenced your practice?

Chuquimamani-Condori
Thank you for having me here. I wish we were speaking in Italian—I’ll have to practice for next time. And thank you for your question.
When it comes to landscape, we’re taught from an early age that we are inseparable from it. The landscape is us, and it’s also our ancestors. We speak to the ancestors on our walk, on what is sometimes called the taki taki taki road.
There’s a well-known saying in Aymara that translates as: don’t pity queer or q’iwa people, because they walk looking at the stars. We call our guardian Chuqi Chinchay, the star. So what is out there is also what’s inside us.

M.
Okay, so what's inside now?

CC.
Like you said before, it’s not always so explicit anymore which landscape I’m referring to, but that element definitely comes out in the textures of the music.

M.
When you’re working from your studio or your apartment, what do you see outside the window?

CC.
Fields of corn and rice.

M.
I feel that vastness in American Drift, for example. Does that resonate with you?

CC.
Yes. As I said, I feel the landscape is internal too. Part of the music is like walking through the work itself, a way of exploring the contradiction between the internal and the external.

M.
In American Drift you also addressed the geological sense of landscape, which I think still emerges in your more recent work. In a way, it connects back to your early projects, including your work as E+E, through this idea of geological layering.

CC.
How do you say that in Italian…?

M.
The literal translation would be E+E. Or and&and, also.

CC.
So it makes sense for you too.

M.
Also in the name, as you point out, there’s a sense of layering and multiple identities. I was drawn to the idea of talking about identity in geological terms—I think it’s a very nice image.

CC.
At the time, I think I was just trying to sound educated when I wasn’t. Fortunately, through Facebook, I made friends with professors and philosophers. One of them was a geology professor, and I think that’s where some of that language came from.

M.
Virginia was also a very particular territory in that sense. For example, the swamps were places where Maroons hid, so the landscape itself was murky and complex. I’ve never actually been to Virginia, so I’m not speaking from direct experience, but that’s how I imagine it.

CC.
Yes, the Great Dismal Swamp in the South. But the South and the North are quite different places.

M.
I see. I was thinking about the cover art for the Moth / Lake EP, which depicts the landscape of the Great Dismal Swamp. In the original image there are two maroon slaves escaping from a white slave owner, but you erased the figures to focus more directly on the landscape itself.

CC.
I think it’s important to understand that erasing the colonial image of the enslaved subject doesn’t actually erase it—it remains embedded in the landscape. And that’s also where indigeneity disappears. There’s a complication when people try to name Blackness and then define indigeneity outside of Blackness.
Denise Ferreira da Silva speaks about this very clearly, especially when she explores how we are inscribed into, or disappeared within, the elemental. I’ll leave it to people to read her work, because I don’t feel I can express it as well as she does.

‍M.
I think the book is Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva, if anyone wants to read it. It has never been translated, her other book was.
Moving on—you recently stated in an interview that, as you grow older, you want your music to become “uglier.” We’re very interested in this idea. What do you mean by “ugly”? Because to us, your music doesn’t sound ugly at all.

CC.
You know, it’s hard to remember interviews—I might not have even said that. But thinking about it, I’m sure I was probably trying to challenge the models of beauty that were handed down to me growing up. And I didn’t mean it in terms of good versus bad—not like “this model is bad, this one is good, let’s make better ones.” It was more a question of whether a given understanding of beauty is useful to me. Is it generative? Does it bring me closer to what’s important?
I can give an example. I remember reading a passage in the archive—18th or 19th century, either French or Spanish colonials. They were witnessing one of our ceremonies, and they commented on how much they loved the feather work, the tocados, the regalia, the masks. But then they wrote that they couldn’t say the same for our music—whose “pure Indian monotony drove them from the plaza, never to return,” or something along those lines.
And I remember getting similar comments when we first started releasing music: things like, “these aren’t true songs, they’re just repetitions, vignettes at best, nothing happens, nothing changes.” But understanding the repetitions of our ceremonial music—repetitions that might seem simple or easy to dismiss—is fundamental, because they’re the basis of what we do. And really, they’re also the basis for all American music.
So being reminded of that—the role of the medicine, of music as medicine—puts me in my place. It humbles me, for sure.

‍M.
So you wanted to embrace that? It’s almost like a prophetic, provocative comment from your interlocutors: they appreciated the visual aspects of your ceremonies, but found the music monotonous. And you seem to feel that this is exactly the point of the music—something you actually want to embrace.

CC.
Yeah.

M.
Nice, thank you. I'll pass the mic to Giulia now.

Giulia
So, my question probably is going to be a little bit longer, because I want to give some context to our listeners. One of your works that I love the most is Dissolution of Sovereignty–although unfortunately I never had the chance to attend the live performance.

‍CC.
I think the recording was better because I didn’t get to have my dad with me and the whole work is inspired by his preaching, when he was a pastor.

G.
Ok, so I won’t feel so sorry anymore. Anyway, it is so beautifully epic and I think it is one of the best contemporary examples of sound’s narrative possibilities, of music's ability to world-build and to connect references to historical facts and futuristic perspectives–from the revolt and execution of Bartolina Sisa to the AI that reanimates her remains, the possibility of the abolition and collapse of the prison system–in a non-linear but nevertheless perfectly intelligible and understandable way. Is a work to which I think one can apply the logic of analysis that Kodwo Eshun assimilated to artists like Drexcya in More Brilliant Than The Sun, a work that can rightfully enjoy the definition of ‘Sonic Fiction’. “The Future is our domain” as it says the voice at the beginning of the piece. “The here and now is a prison house”; and speaking about the future, in an interview about Dissolution you stated that you think your life is a process of generating hope, which is a thought that strikes me very much. Almost ten years later, I'd like to ask you how far you feel you have come in that process, in the sense that DJ E, in many ways, is an extremely joyful and vitalistic album, embodying a deeply hopeful energy. I think all your albums actually had it in them, but in DJ E it seems to me to explode. I know it's a long and confusing question, but I hope it generates in you some thoughts that you wish to share.

CC.
Before we get to the subject of hope, you made me think about this idea of how our work connects to the future of our people. There’s a famous anthropologist—I think she was French—who was considered an expert on our Nation. She once wrote a book where she asked: what is the future for these people? What is their conception of the end?
Her conclusion was that we don’t have a future as it’s commonly understood. Our future is structured like the past, but renewed. If you don’t understand this, it could be mistaken for being only the past. I can’t go into the details anymore, but your question about hope made me think of that.
Now that I’m older, I feel I have better language for it, and I want to share a quote from our elder, Benali, who passed away earlier this year. It was a huge loss for the California community. I also want to acknowledge and honor our older wounded who recently left us.
The quote from Benali is: “Hope is not the opposite of despair. Action is.”
Personally, I think I’ve just learned to be quiet and to practice listening. By “shutting up,” I mean recognizing that hope can also be a form of passivity. Our ways of listening are a gift—to the people and to the earth. That’s what I believe has been my brother’s greatest gift too: sharing our form of listening, even before any kind of creation. It’s something people can really carry with them.

‍G.
Thank you. Bringing up the issue of action—as intertwined with hope—feels especially urgent in a time like this, globally. Speaking about hope and action also means speaking about time. As you mentioned, and as the anthropologist you referred to suggested, there’s a kind of bias in how we talk about the future.
It’s not really that the future comes after the past in a conventional sense, but rather that the past renews the future, and vice versa.
This brings me to another question, quoting someone we both know and admire—Sonia Garcia (ciao Sonia, if you’re listening!). In her text for Flash Art, she wrote: “we, in and out the Abya Yala diaspora, are sure their work will forever be both timeless and specific. This is how resistance is made”.
To me, being “timeless and specific at the same time” feels like a perfect description of your artistic and musical approach. Would you like to share some thoughts with us starting from this idea?

‍CC.
You have me thinking about this feeling of eternity that exists inside the very, very small. I feel like physics—and the enormous violence and wealth that have shaped the sciences as we know them—can sometimes prevent us from reaching those kinds of ideas.
But for me it’s more of a feeling: this sense that a single point can open into everything, and at the same time into nothing.

G.
Once again, I think this also relates to action. Seeing a possible connection between what we call today scientific thought and, to simplify, non-Western systems of knowledge is itself a call to action. It suggests that we can actively think about other ways to enact progress—progress understood in a completely different way.
Opening up new possibilities beyond the very Western notion of scientific progress and data, while including other forms of knowledge on the same level, is something that could immediately translate into action. So, speaking of action, maybe we can return to music.

G.
Speaking of production contexts, it seems interesting to us that you chose to completely self-produce DJ E, which is an intentionally unmastered album. Would you like to tell us more about this choice? Does it have any connection with that idea of “ugly music” we just mentioned?

‍CC.
If a record label gave me lots of money, I’d probably work with a producer. But one thing I do regret is that, in the past, when I worked with labels and felt I had to produce an “official” record, I sometimes took for granted the production quality that came from my own limited means.
I don’t really know how to engineer or use equipment properly, but a particular sound came out of that framework. Finding fidelity to that texture is important, because—as we were saying earlier—that texture says something. I think I’ve often taken that for granted.
It reminds me of something I read when I was younger, about physicists debating the texture of space-time at the Planck scale. They asked whether it was granular or smooth. That fascinated me, because when it comes to texture, there are profound implications—spiritual or even theological ones. I was raised by a pastor, so for me it always becomes theological. And of course, that’s central to us: the American Indian Movement was founded on a spiritual background and on spiritual importance.
I don’t want to ramble too much, so I’ll leave it there.

‍G.
We actually love to hear your ramble—so no problem there.
Once again, speaking about production contexts: my last question goes back to something we mentioned earlier in the introduction, in Italian. All our questions so far have been about music, but we know you also work within the field of visual arts.
For us, the interdisciplinary span of your practice is something important to highlight, because we perceive it as one and the same. Music and visual arts both seem to address the same issues, and probably unfold through similar processes. That was the idea we had—I say we because it’s something I discussed with other members of ALMARE and Aline (Metamorfosi Notturne).
We see a deep continuity in your work, so we just wanted to ask: how do you feel about that? Do you perceive any difference between the processes of production in music and in visual arts, or is it simply a matter of working in different production contexts, like the music industry versus the art world?

‍CC.
First, thank you so much for your questions and for honoring what we do. Blessings to both of you.
I go back to where these songs — what we call medicine — come from. We say they come from the sufi, from the mermaids, from the spring. Growing up we had piano lessons and classes, but those didn’t give us the songs — the spring gave us the songs. The spring is where our joy comes from; it’s the source of our medicine. It could never belong to us.
In that sense, there’s an obligation of reciprocity to our people: the medicine is free, it’s here. I’ve been around long enough to see how this medicine changes — it changes us, it changes our walk, it changes our voice. When that is the focus, other distinctions matter less.
One more thing: my brother and I both have synesthesia, which I only recently understood neurologically. It’s like our synapses never got pruned or something — so perception can be porous and intermingled. I don’t think that limits anything; it opens possibilities.

Mattia
Yeah. Medicine can take any any form.

CC.
Exactly. Yeah. And it could become poison to.

‍M.
Sorry—we promised that was the last question, but you just brought up something that makes me want to ask one more. You mentioned your family, and your decision to involve your brother in your practice. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship?

CC.
Yeah, I guess so. Maybe that connects to my rambling in the last question. We were both gifted these songs in ceremony from my grandpa—my brother, my cousin, my twin cousin Derek, and me. I feel like once we had the songs, we were bound by them.
I think it’s better to work together. It wasn’t really a decision, and it still isn’t—it just is. Honestly, I’d probably be terrible to work with otherwise.

M.
Thank you. I doubt it, but thank you.

G.
It's family.