“Huaco portrait”, Gabriela Wiener | The duty

A Peruvian journalist who has lived and worked in Spain for 15 years, Gabriela Wiener says that her great-great-grandfather, an Austrian “archaeologist” and adventurer named Charles Wiener – commissioned by the French government – ​​reported in Europe 4000 pre-Columbian pieces. But is she really the descendant of this looter of archaeological sites who was, says legend, “on the verge” of finding Machu Picchu? She mixes in Huaco portrait this quest for origins to the story of her father’s mourning, as well as episodes of what she calls her “contradictory life”, her assumed polyamorous relationship with a man and a woman jeopardized by her jealousy and her ” anachronistic infidelity. A personal book, sometimes daring, a bit of a catch-all too, in which she explores (as much as she fears) as a “racialized” person the consequences of the decolonization of consciousness on her own romantic and sexual life.

Huaco portrait

★★★

Gabriela Wiener, translated by Laura Alcoba, Métailié, Paris, 2023, 160 pages

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