Catalogue > At random

Almost four years ago, the Wiphala Collective climbed the statue of Christopher Columbus in La Paz, Bolivia, and shattered its nose with a single blow. That same year, my sister underwent cosmetic surgery to change the nose she inherited from our father, but when she left the operating room, she no longer recognized herself in the mirror. In El Alto, Bolivia, a growing trend toward rhinoplasty seeks to alter what many call the “condor nose,” driven by clinics offering discounts and by an urban landscape saturated with billboards, mannequins, and advertisements displaying white faces, light hair, and upturned noses. The statue of Christopher Columbus comes to life after its nose is struck. Disoriented, it wanders through the streets of El Alto, revisiting its past and confronting the contrast between its colonial memory and the presence of the Indigenous bodies that inhabit the city. Throughout its journey, it explores its own fractured identity and that of the city, until it finds itself face to face with the bust of an Aymara man, bearer of a chola aesthetic and imaginary. This encounter symbolizes resistance to hegemonic beauty standards and the possibility of rewriting history from a decolonial perspective. The experience unfolds in virtual reality, allowing the viewer to accompany the statue’s transformation and the reconciliation with our own noses.

Viviana Mamani Cori is an Aymara, migrant, brown-skinned artist born in El Alto, Bolivia. Her practice emerges from a non-academic formation shaped by migration, the streets, and the popular aesthetics of the Andean plateau, where chola architecture and bootleg DVDs, molded her early sensibility toward glitch, noise, and clandestine images. She later pursued studies in architecture and cinematography, expanding her work into experimental film, photography, performance, and new media. Her practice intertwines intimate archives, territorial memory, and embodied gestures that confront colonial narratives around beauty, identity, and Indigenous representation. She has created works that have circulated in streets, community spaces, galleries, and festivals across Latin America and Europe. She was selected for Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires 2022 and took part in the DIP artistic residency in 2024, where she received creative guidance from prominent Latin American filmmakers such as Lucrecia Martel and Maite Alberdi. Her project Cristóbal Condori: Una nariz de ficción received multiple recognitions in photography, contemporary art, and experimental cinema. In 2025, she received the Prince Claus Seed Award for a trajectory that explores identity, migration, memory, and the body as a political territory of resistance. She currently lives and develops her artistic practice from El Alto, Bolivia.