Cultivar Trilce is an agricultural artwork and performance of non-human bodies by artist Emilio Santisteban in collaboration with numerous participants. It links the centenary of the first publication of César Vallejo’s poetry book Trilce, the published Quechua translation of that book, the potato varieties of the subspecies solanum tuberosum andigena, and the system of terraces developed by the original Andean cultures.
It takes place on an Inca platform that the Centro Willka T’ika is developing in the Yucay Archaeological Complex (Urubamba, Cusco), in five agricultural cycles between 2022 and 2027. In them, the 77 poems of Trilce in Quechua version will be engraved and cultivated in potatoes that thus perform the human thought/language transmuting it into seed-poetry, flower-poetry and food-poetry. In 2022 we have cultivated poems I to XV, which were engraved on potatoes by twenty-two participants; this year we are cultivating poems XVI to XXX, engraved by fifty-nine people.
Cultivar Trilce is curated by Lizet Díaz Machuca, assisted by farmers Honorato Mora, Celia Morales, Nicolas Saywa, Germania Madera, and artist Kenyi Quispe Granados. It is supported by the Centro Willka T’ika para la Conservación del Patrimonio Natural y Cultural Andino, and with the collaboration of the Instituto Nacional para las Lenguas Originarias, the Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad del Cusco, the Centro Cultural de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes del Perú, the Instituto de Investigaciones Museológicas y Artísticas de la Universidad Ricardo Palma and Corriente Alterna Escuela de Diseño, Arte y Creatividad. In 2022 he received an Economic Stimulus for Culture from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture.
