The sacred does not impose itself—it manifests where body, matter, and attention become intertwined. In MINA DE AURA, Donna Huanca (Chicago, 1980) transforms the Exterior Chapel of the CAAC into a living architecture—a ritual atmosphere where the pictorial, the corporeal, and the environmental coexist as a single vibration. Space becomes organism, painting becomes skin, and air becomes a shared body.
For centuries, this chapel stood as a symbolic threshold. Carthusian monks contemplated the world from within, and through this space flowed species, minerals, and ritual objects arriving from the Americas, at a time when Seville became a central port of imperial exchange. MINA DE AURA gathers this stratified history of reception and transformation and reinterprets it through a contemporary, syncretic, and spiritual lens.
Donna Huanca conceives this installation as an expanded body, where Andean cosmologies, colonial iconographies, and contemporary languages intertwine without hierarchy. The cyclical energy of Pachamama, feminine, telluric, and generative, enters into dialogue with the architecture of Baroque liturgy. Painted surfaces intertwine with performative traces; chemical memory with gesture; pigment with ancestral offering. The sacred does not represent—it is embodied, breathed, activated. The possibility of weaving together diverse forms of knowledge finds a conceptual resonance in the thought of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (La Paz, 1949), Aymara sociologist and historian. Her notion of ch’ixi thinking proposes a logic in which the Indigenous and the Western intertwine in a state of constant tension, maintaining their distinctiveness. This perspective offers a key to understanding how MINA DE AURA brings together the Baroque and the Andean, the ritual and the contemporary, the intimate and the cosmic. Each dimension sustains the others in an active coexistence, where languages coexist, brush against one another, and become mutually enriched, shaping a spirituality that is plural, open, and porous.
The Baroque altarpiece remains beneath the intervention, its presence latent, anchoring the installation in the memory of the place. Over it, Huanca unfurls a painted surface derived from photographic traces, layered with oil paint and dense brushwork. Each
mark models the gesture in matter, dragging it, thickening it. The altar breathes with the vibration of a remembering skin. For Huanca, painting is a form of embodied knowledge. a sensitive terrain where history, emotion, and biochemical inheritance converge. As Simone de Beauvoir (Paris,
1908-1986) writes, the body is a situation, a way of grasping the world and projecting oneself into it. The work unfolds in that fold where pictorial matter and existence affect one another.
The installation unfolds like a suspended choreography. Translucent curtains soften the stone walls, filtering light as if the architecture itself were breathing. A subtle, earthy
fragrance fills the space, evoking ritual, purification, and ancestral memory. This olfactory layer opens a subconscious channel, grounding the visitor while unsettling temporal
coordinates.
White sand layered over a dance platform turns the floor into a geo-poetic surface. Every step leaves an ephemeral trace across a ritual ground. From a phenomenological perspective, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Rochefort-sur-Mer, Francia, 1908 – París, 1961) stated that the body is the place where the visible and the invisible, the interior and the exterior, intertwine. Here, movement is not merely transition, but a form of thought. The space listens, absorbs, and responds. At the centre, a circular mirrored sculpture in stainless steel rises toward the ceiling. It mirrors the geometry of the altar and transforms it into a non-linear temporal axis—a portal reflecting the cycles of sun and moon, birth and decay. Silver, a recurring material in Huanca’s work, draws a line to the mines of Potosí in Bolivia, her father’s birthplace and one of the highest cities in the world, evoking histories of extraction, colonization, and the transmutation of matter into myth. In this cosmo-gram, silver operates not only as material but also as cosmological signifier, anchoring the work in Andean mythologies while expanding outward into planetary imaginaries.
The altar manifests as a hyperdimensional site, interwoven with natural textures, metals, minerals, and traces of planetary memory. Rather than fixing into a static form, it unfolds as a living, speculative structure, an altar that dreams, mutates, and breathes. Throughout the exhibition, the installation is activated through two performances that deepen its ritual dimension. The body appears as a vessel of energy, inscribing a subtle presence into space that reshapes the environment. Its aura remains suspended, like a luminous spectre that envelops the altar and amplifies its sacred resonance. The image dissolves into the air and gives way to an invisible, almost divine matter that inhabits the threshold between the tangible and the ethereal. In this passage, the body reveals itself as a permeable conduit for spirit, myth, and memory.
This sensory threshold opens a field of expanded perception, where the senses are no longer isolated but become subtle channels of knowledge. Sound, scent, light, and matter compose a fabric that envelops the body, turning it into an instrument of presence, of attention, of offering. In this suspended state, everything becomes passage. MINA DE AURA erects an-altar that breathes—where painting becomes skin, the sculpture becomes a celestial axis, and the chapel—once again—welcomes what arrives from afar: forms, memories, presences, and spectres returning as shared breath.