The work’s title—written in Mochica, one of the many native languages spoken today in Peru—can be loosely translated as “I will outlive you”. The Moche civilization, famous for its pottery, developed in that region from ancient times up to approximately the 7th century AD, and its language was widespread in the Inca Empire at the time of the Spanish invasion. Drawing on the Moche belief in the afterlife and a human figure featured in an artifact of that culture exhibited at the Berlin Ethnological Museum, the artist fictionalizes a timeline from her childhood to her symbolic incarceration at the Berlin institution.
