Línea de Nazca (Nazca Line), 2008

Overview

In a single take, the camera records a car racing across the Pan-American Highway in the southern Peruvian desert, the location of the Nazca Lines, ancient geoglyphs dating from 300 bc–900 ad. The video is accompanied by a graphite wall drawing of a stepladder, which echoes the activities of Maria Reiche, a German woman who studied the Nazca Lines in the middle of the last century.

She would walk through the desert holding a broom and a stepladder, tirelessly dusting the surface to get a better view – an impossible task, since any close observation of these gigantic depictions will always be partial.

The installation is completed by five framed captions from the oldest book about the Nazca Lines; reprinted without the corresponding images, these texts refer to the necessary altitude from which to understand the drawings.

Línea de Nazca is an attempt to move away from the flat postcard version of this site towards a three-dimensional landscape that cancels visibility but offers materiality. A simple shift in viewpoint reinvents this over determined territory and forces us to disregard the established relationship between signs and images.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11