KIRKI QHAÑI – Container of Andean Poetics by Elvira Espejo Ayca is a collection of essays and poems/songs situating Aymara ancestrality and Andean Poetics within the ongoing decolonization project.  The book is a beautiful archive of Andean traditions and a powerful call to address urgent futures. KIRKI QHAÑI is in itself a bag of diverging moments and temporalities, a collection of innumerable voices, a container of Andean poetics.

Introductions by Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz; professor in the Department of Literature at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Miguel Rocha Vivas; and INCA Press founders Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.

Elvira Espejo Ayca is one of the most emblematic Bolivian poets of her generation. But there is more than Elvira Espejo’s poetry: she is also a visual artist, a storyteller, a singer, a weaver, a philosopher, a museum director, a teacher, a lecturer, and finally, she is also a binational Aymara-Quechua woman from the Ayllu of Qaqachaka, in the southern Oruro province, in the Central Andes – embracing millenary ancestral tradition, and making contemporary Bolivian culture shine internationally. For her outstanding commitment and engagement in culture in 2020 she was invested with the Goethe Medaille, the most prestigious distinction in culture awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany; in 2024 she was nominated Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; she has shown her art and represented Bolivia at some of the most prestigious international venues, such as the Venice Biennale, the Mercosul Biennale in Porto Alegre, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the House of World Cultures HKW Berlin; she won many prizes at Latin American poetry and literature festivals, in Bolivia, in Chile, in Cuba, in Venezuela; she held keynote addresses at international conferences and academic symposiums such as the CIMAM Annual Conference in Buenos Aires and the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM in Mexico City; and last but not least, for almost twelve years now she has been directing the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (MUSEF) in La Paz, where she has not only established the museum as the most impressive contemporary site of cultural and knowledge production –publishing over 40 books, including eleven collection catalogues with over 500 pages each, conference readers, audio-visual documentaries and an educational animation series that has been widely critically acclaimed and broadcasted on international TV channels– after entirely redesigning the museography she has also made the MUSEF become the most visited museum in Bolivia for several years in a row.

Editors and translators: Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, Elvira Espejo Ayca
Translation revision: Adrian Alarcón
Drawings: Salvador Pomar
Design: Rafaela Dražić
Published 2025