El viento will bring us home

Blas isasi

June 7 - July 19, 2025

El Viento Will Bring Us Home continues Blas Isasi’s long-term investigation into the collapse of the Incan empire and its lingering aftermath across time. This new installation centers on one of the most pivotal and haunting episodes in Andean history: the capture and ransom of the Inca emperor Atahualpa.

In 1532, after the Battle of Cajamarca, Atahualpa was taken hostage by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. In exchange for his release, Atahualpa offered a ransom unprecedented in scale: a room filled once with gold and twice with silver, delivered from across the empire. The room—known today as the Ransom Room—became a symbol of both unimaginable wealth and irreversible betrayal. Despite the ransom being fulfilled, Atahualpa was executed in 1533, and the amassed treasures were melted down, shipped off, or otherwise lost to history. What remained was not only the physical absence of these ancestral objects, but a deep psychic and cultural wound—an irreparable rupture in the cosmology of the Inca world.

Isasi reimagines this moment not as an ending, but as an ongoing echo. His installation contemplates the fate of these metals—gold and silver that continue to circulate as global commodities—and speculates on their return through acts of cosmic justice and spiritual rebalancing. In this work, sculpture becomes both a channel and a counterspell: a means of engaging deep time, ancestral grief, and the possibility of repair.