Activated Mimesis: Abstraction and Movement as Inca Visual Hegemonies
On the dawn of the December solstice Inca religious specialists conducted their annual ritual of solar renewal, the Capac Raymi, with a monumental textile in hand. This nine-hundred-foot rope was the central accoutrement that was processed in the yahuayra dance on this occasion that culminated upon the sunrise. The moment that the performers laid the rope to the ground in a spiral, it acquired its mimetic likeness to a snake, and became transfigured beyond a mere rope. I have amassed a corpus of small-scale textile snakes that fit the description of this much larger work, which is now destroyed. I argue that they are more representational simulacra of the enormous textile. I contextualize these objects in their respective ritual use that preceded the enormous rope’s procession to show that they prepared it to be seen as a mimetic image through performance. This case-study reveals that “activated mimesis” was necessary for Inca state textiles to acquire aniconic referents. I decolonize modern understandings of Inca visual culture by challenging scholarly assumptions regarding the prevalence of abstraction and instead show that most Inca works were not viewed as abstractions by their intended audiences.
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