El Imperio del Sol / Empire of the Sun

2011

sistema solar / solar system
coins in chronological order from lower to higher value.

The value that we attribute to metal, is a fiction, is not what it’s worth, but what we need it to be. The iconography of the coins is the starting point to question the value of our culture, how this came to us transforming itself and how the systems of negotiation in which we live in works. We are carrying on our backs our cultural inheritance, in a piece of metal of different denominations.

The importance of the Sol* and the nature in the Andean life, has come to us from hand to hand. The man had the Inti as his creator, and because of it, was adored and people came to him in search of favors and help. The life at that time, was governed by a constant negotiation by the Inti (god sol/sun) and other gods.

The Sol blurs the limit between the reality and the fiction across time, as a new cosmovision. At some point, we stop staring the sky, to look at what is on our hands.

*Meaning both the sun and the peruvian currency. 

El imperio del sol. 80m2 Livia Benavides Gallery. 2011