Inka Snow
2006
Mixed media
30 × 265 × 202 cm
Inka Snow revisits the experimental practices of collective living models from the 1960s and 70s, along with the social and ideological aspirations of the era. A scale architectural model for a communal housing project lies beneath topographic scars—covered with bold cocaine lines—on rugged terrain composed of “snow” mounds. In 1960s Peru, “Inca snow” was slang for cocaine.
When architecture and landscape collide violently, they suggest the potential collapse of the natural world into a space of manipulation. Andrade Tudela is interested in exposing the relationship between the historical, the transgression of the informal, and the imposition of the new. Inka Snow references the Nazca Lines, where new traces or scars have been inscribed by trucks indiscriminately cutting across the desert. Finally, in 1968, the maverick archaeologist Erich von Däniken proposed that the lines functioned as interstellar landing strips—a reading that, certainly, suggests another kind of trip.
