Past Event: Listening to the Colonial Archive: A Quechua Song, a Ceramic Jar, an Ancestor’s Voice: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Felipe Ledesma Núñez

This talk attends to the sonic traces buried in a seventeenth-century Andean colonial manuscript, recovering from its fractures a Quechua song and the only known historical record of the pre-Columbian use of whistling bottles. Ceramic reconstructions of these archaeological artifacts frame discussion of rituals of song and dance at water sources, meditations on the aquatic movements underlying Andean metaphysics, the sacred knowledge disclosed through clay molding, and the colonial silencing imposed by the lettered privileging of symbolic systems and written sources.

On August 9, 1662, Catholic inquisitors entered the Peruvian highlands to investigate reports of pre-Columbian ritual among Indigenous villagers. The coerced testimonies they collected contain textual fragments in Quechua. Using music theory, I piece together these fractured voices to reconstruct the meter, lyrics, and form of a song honoring Coya Huarmi, a ceramic vessel believed to be a primeval female ancestor. Mobilizing archival and anthropological inquiry, I present the song as a record of kinship and sacred memory that bound the community together. Questioning reports that the jar was able to speak, I uncover the first known documentation of the use of whistling jars. Through the ritual of molding clay, I recreate the sounds described in the manuscript and open my ears to the ancestral knowledge resonating through living matter.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker Bio:

Felipe Ledesma Núñez is an Ecuadorian artist and historian of sound. He reads colonial archives, studies archaeological artifacts, and molds clay to explore the long history of Andean ritual. Ledesma reads archives from a native perspective and crafts ceramics to counter symbolic silencing. His introspective scholarship attends to perception and cognition, and to the colonial structures that shape his world. His ears are open to the ancestral voices that colonial powers sought to eradicate and that lettered epistemologies deem folly. This approach has yielded remarkable discoveries, including the only known archival documentation of whistling bottles and the earliest reconstruction of a Quechua song, which will be the focus of today’s lecture. Ledesma is the first Ecuadorian to receive a PhD from Harvard in any discipline. He has presented at numerous international events, including a keynote at the University of York, and his research has been supported by Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard Horizons, and the Society for American Music. His path to Harvard began at Universidad de Cuenca in Ecuador and continued through SUNY Stony Brook and Northwestern State University of Louisiana. At Yale, Ledesma is completing the monograph Coya Huarmi: Listening to the Colonial Archive, and the exhibition uYAKu.