ESPEJO AYCA, Elvira
KIRKI QHAÑI – Container of Andean Poetics

A collection of essays and poems/songs situating Aymara ancestrality and Andean Poetics within the ongoing decolonization project – an 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.

The book contains 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. Illustrations by Salvador Pomar, and book design by Rafaela Drazic. 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. [publishers’ note]

Published by INCA Press, 2025
Design by Rafaela Dražić
Poetry