The Second Room of the Rescue

The Second Room of the Rescue is presented as a fictional museum that refers to the famous Rescue Room of the Inca Atahualpa, a room that he had filled with gold and silver in exchange for his liberation from colonizers. (He was never released and murdered instead).

The installation holds itself like a house of cards made out of 105 paintings of Inca archeological artifacts that were published in the exhibition catalogue Machu Picchu Unveiling the Mystery of the Inca organized by Yale University in 2004.

While the exhibition traveled within the United States and welcomed more than 1 million visitors, it revived the dispute between Yale University, who collaborated with the discovery and preservation of the pieces since 1911, and the Peruvian government that requests its return since the loan period ended.

The Second Room of the Rescue does pretend to question the legality of the dispute. Its aim is to highlight the fact that one of the arguments why Yale rejects the return of the artifacts is due to the lack of museum built to preserve the pieces in Peru.

What type of museum is expected from the other?

What kind of museology can be done without the return of the pieces?

The Second Room of the Rescue is a metaphor of the museum made from transferred information, digested by the other, that, as a result, constructs itself from weak equilibriums. In this case, this fictitious museum uses the unique source available on these works, the catalogue published by Yale University.

Contrary to Atahualpa who offered to fill a space for his release, The Second Room of the Rescue offers itself as an empty space, constructed and delimited by the canons of external information.

—

Since November 2010, Yale University accepted to return of the Inca artifacts to the Peruvian government.