The Apacheta and Tribuna sculptures are part of a new series of works that reinforce Randall Weeks' interest in exploring –through evocative abstract images– the tension between natural space and ideas associated with modernity and progress.

The work that receives the visitor is Apacheta, a spiral staircase more than seven meters high that is located at the center of the entrance to the Exhibition Palace, visually joining the first and second floors of the building. This monumental piece will be connected to a motor that will keep it in constant rotating motion. In some of the interior rungs of the metal framework, silver and copper rocks can be seen in their raw state, turning in reverse motion to that of the external structure; giving the piece a particular rhythm and tempo. The title of this piece alludes to the custom –extended in the Peruvian Andes– of stacking a mound of stones on the roads as a memory or sign of devotion, but it seems to also evoke the recovery of vernacular forms as opposed to a purely conception modernist of sculpture as an autonomous aesthetic object. While the rotating movement seems to refer to a cyclical time, its shape could be associated with the basic structure of a DNA molecule, or with the technologies used in the exploitation of the territory and its resources. The second work, located in the center of the MALI lobby, is the one that gives this exhibition its name. Tribuna is a sculpture of four modules carved in the manner of a chacana or Andean cross, whose distribution generates four narrow passageways that invite you to enter the interior space. This massive sculpture of more than fifteen tons of stacked majolica, stratified and subjected to an abrasion process, has books on economy, labor movements, education and urbanism in Peru inserted among the tiles. The sculpture refers us to the idea of ​​shabby foundations, or to a rugged geography eroded by the passage of time; and in turn acquires new connotations in the current context, associated with the negligence of human management and devastation as a result of ecological imbalance.

MALI in situ is a program that invites artists of different nationalities to present works specifically conceived for specific spaces inside or outside the museum building.

​

Sharon Lerner