'Machu Picchu and the Treasures of Peru', the spectacular exhibition in Paris that reviews the history of the Incas

Flying over the citadel of Machu Picchu in the company of its founder, Emperor Pachacutec, or admiring pre-Columbian jewels that never left Peru, this is the spectacular exhibition about the Inca world and its predecessors that opens this weekend in Paris.

“Machu Picchu and the Treasures of Peru” is a joint project of World Heritage, a cultural event promoter that achieved great success in Paris with a retrospective dedicated to Pharaoh Tutankhamun, and the Larco Museum in Lima, which has lent nearly 200 objects of all kinds.

Copper death masks, gold ornaments, huge black porphyry earrings, turquoise necklaces... the retrospective celebrates “the successes of ancient Peruvian civilizations over 3,000 years” Carole Fraresso, curator of the exhibition and associate researcher at the Larco Museum, explained to AFP.

For the spectacular flight “to the eye of the condor” of Machu Picchu, the culmination of the visit, the organizers took advantage of the exceptional closure, for eight months, of the site, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.

They filmed the place with a drone, and the images served for an immersive and virtual experience that is dizzying.

The visitor flies over the place, where buildings are painstakingly reproduced and crops, the daily life of its inhabitants, rituals in the time of splendor of the Incas are simulated.

THE WORLD ON THREE LEVELS

However, “the Incas represent 80, 90 years of Peruvian history” that spans millennia, recalls Fraresso.

Machu Picchu represents the height of the empire. But before, for centuries, the chavin, nazca, mochica, huari, chimu civilizations flourished...

The exhibition is an introduction to these cultures, with an exceptional sample of their objects, also reproduced in 3D, to unravel their symbology.

The objective is to explain “how the societies of ancient Peru thought about the world,” the expert added.

“The world on three levels: the upper plane, of celestial bodies, the lower one, where the ancestors and the dead are found. And in the middle, men,” he said.

“Men are going to create rituals, activities to be in permanent connection with these different worlds,” he explained.

One of the protagonists of this incessant journey between the earthly world and beyond is Ai Apaec, hero of the Mochica culture (100-800 after JC).

Invested with superhuman virtues, Ai Apaec is able to rescue the Sun from the bottom of the ocean and offer it back to humans, through crops.

The exhibition shows examples of this worship, the most perfected objects of worship.

“They are agricultural societies, which essentially depend on the cycles of each season,” recalls Fraresso.

The priests observe natural phenomena, the stars, often with an unknown rigor in Europe of that same time.

In addition to libations, with hallucinogenic substances, we sometimes have to appease the gods with sacrifices, of flames, of children, of virgins who are buried alive.

The gold or silver daggers, the richly carved chicha drinking cups follow each other throughout the exhibition.

All these civilizations culminate in the Inca empire, made up of “incredible managers and soldiers who guarantee the expansion and administration of a vast territory of more than 900,000 km2,” says Fraresso.

Machu Picchu was built around 1450. Just before the arrival of the conquerors, who put an end to one of the greatest civilizations of mankind.

(With information from AFP)

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