Wayqeycuna not only concludes a trilogy that makes Andean communities visible, it also led you to move back to a place you left behind a long time ago. How did that come about?

I needed to talk about my biological and cultural brothers, because life made our paths diverge. I was very young when I left my community, and I had never gone back because of my homosexuality. I grew up in solitude, and I felt rejected, I felt shame being who I am. Indigenous cultures talk about two-spirit people, visionaries who embody both masculine and feminine energy, and who brought communities together. But the conquest and the Jesuits implanted an extremely binary vision of the family, and everything outside of that was frowned upon. The Catholic church is still very present in rural areas, and life there is hard for homosexuals, whose life expectancy isn’t much more than thirty years.

I say in the piece, “no one thought I could survive hell, but here I am.” No one thought I would come back. But creating freed me from the fear of being who I am, and it I proved I was one of them. I came back as Tiziano Cruz: I represent that community, I’m in the media, there are people writing about me… The challenge for me was to give my community a voice by putting aside the bitterness that had accumulated over the years, to come back there and to connect. And one of the amazing things that happened was that people had been following my work on social media, and they were telling me what they wanted the world to know about them, what they wanted me to film or not for the show. That’s how it came together.

The idea of collectivity and collaboration comes up also in the bread-making workshop held prior to the performance. Why is that so important to you?

I come from one of the parts of the world that has other stories, and other ways of telling them. What we’re doing is more about experience than about the artistic canon; what we want is to share an experience, because our philosophy of life is based in community. Obviously that affects our aesthetic as well.

The effect of colonization on our communities is well known. We have to work to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and the changes we aspire to can’t happen in isolation. The revolution we’re hoping for can’t only be Indigenous; we have to do it all together. My job is to share our community philosophy with the world and find allies. Wayqeycuna offers a perspective that goes beyond the differences between Indigenous people and settlers, and it says that we can work together. That’s the spirit of indigenous cultures. The Brazilian thinker Ailton Krenak talks about the ancestral future. That future lies in the community, and in collaboration. That’s the only possible strategy to work together to conquer the common enemy that divides us— neoliberalism. Really, Wayqeycuna for me is about reconciliation on three levels: with my family, with my community, and with white people.

What does the figure of the winged dog created in the bread workshop mean?

The winged dog is a syncretic symbol of the Santa Bárbara procession I filmed for the show. When the conquistadors came, saints replaced mallkis—our dead, who we carried on our shoulders to the top of the mountain to preserve the bodies until the Day of the Dead. The mallkis go to paqarina, what we call heaven, where people go when they leave the terrestrial realm to move to the ancestral realm. The offering of bread to help them reincarnate is practised across Latin America, and every region has different figureheads. Where I’m from, we make a lot of winged dogs, which comes from ancient tradition. The origin is that everybody had dogs, which were sacrificed when someone died: they would be harnessed like horses to transport the dead to paqarina and protect them. There’s no taboo around death in our cultures; it’s just a passage before coming back to life. We’re acutely aware of it; it’s not painful, even though losing someone is. The rituals are tools to help us grieve.

Interview with Tiziano Cruz

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