Wayqeycuna

Tiziano Cruz fled poverty in the province of Jujuy in northern Argentina to study at the national universities in Tucumán and Córdoba, training in cultural management and administration as well as in the performing and visual arts. Cruz is a presence on the international art scene and is also involved institutionally, notably founding ULMUS Gestión Cultural, a platform to support other Indigenous artists.

Various Latin-American institutions noted and supported Cruz’s talent. Cruz spent the first five years of his creative career disrupting public spaces, through interventions such as the opening procession of Soliloquio (FTA, 2023). In 2015, the death of the artist’s younger sister as a result of hospital negligence in their native region inspired a series of radically political works, the minimal staging and eloquence of which shattered the codes of classical theatre. In the trilogy Tres maneras de cantar a una montaña (Three ways of singing to a mountain), Cruz draws on family history and culture to speak out against the systemic discrimination and invisibilization of Indigenous peoples. The first part of the trilogy, Adiós Matepac (an essay on remembrance or farewell), about the artist’s father, won the Buenos Aires Bienal de Arte Joven prize in 2019. In 2022, Cruz created Soliloquio, inspired by fifty-eight letters written to the artist’s mother during the pandemic; that astounding show toured internationally, including in Montreal. Wayqeycuna—“my own brothers” in the Inca Quechua language—looks to biological siblings and ancestry to conclude the trilogy, for which Cruz is already working on an epilogue.