william cordova’s multimedia practice engages cosmology, metaphysics, revolutionary literature and music, and Pre-Colombian history to explore cultural hybridities across time and space. Born in Lima, Peru, cordova was six years old when he first traveled to the United States; his family eventually settled in Miami and he has since lived in a number of major cities throughout the country. These experiences, of shifting environments, of taking and leaving behind, inflect the themes of displacement and communication explored in his work. Memories and histories intertwine, provoking a constellation of visual signifiers, cultural references, latent messages, and spiritual systems.

"machu picchu after dark" is a monumental structure composed of stacked speaker boxes and various integrated found materials. cordova began the sculpture in 2003, and has presented it in modified, unique incarnations since. It’s composition calls to mind famed Incan sites, such as the titular Machu Picchu and Ollantaytampo, while the use of recycled boxes comes from cordova’s childhood memory of seeing cast-off speaker boxes on the streets of Miami while taking a walk with his father. At the time, he mistook the speakers for cajones, a late-eighteenth century Afro-Peruvian drum originally fashioned by slaves from Spanish shipping crates and popularly played throughout the Americas by the nineteenth century. Within these lineages of transformative repurposing, the collected refuse woven through cordova’s work is no longer simply mundane detritus, but artifacts of our own existence.

The fifth iteration of "machu picchu after dark" was commissioned on the occasion of the Seattle Art Museum’s 2013 exhibition, Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and Moon. The two hundred speakers in this version were all collected around Seattle. A small accumulation of LPs, books, small stones, and other used items, also sourced from the city, are arranged in front: an intimate, vernacular shrine to the everyday sounds and movements of the streets. The towering silence of the defunct speakers becomes its own soundscape, a conduit through which the LPs evoke imagined chords, lines of melody, and ghosted echoes throughout the room. While the thesis of the show aligned with cordova’s own background and interest in Andean architecture and contemporary material creation, the inclusion of machu picchu after dark introduced its own multiplicity of readings into the exhibition’s larger framing of Peruvian national and cultural identity. Built from a transtemporal, transregional “sampling” of materials and visual languages, cordova’s adaptive sculpture responds to the erasure of African influence and presence, including the experience of slavery, from Caribbean and South American histories. "machu picchu after dark" unearths the trace links between the Americas and Africa in a mélange of musical associations and sociocultural intricacies, transmitting the reverberations of the past into our sonic present.