Best known for their expansive, experimental music, siblings Joshua Chuquimia Crampton and Chiquimamani-Condori made a film about their late grandmother, Flora Tancara Quiñonez, and the Indigenous Aymaran community they form a part of. Presented online for the first time, Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter combines 8mm-film footage of puppets and landscapes with a free-flowing score courtesy of Joshua. Much like the duo’s musical collaborations, the film operates on a trance-like wavelength.

Commissioned by the South London visual arts institution Auto Italia, Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter follows Flora’s transition to death and her encounters with a dog, a condor, and a bat — central figures in the Aymaran passage to death. Incorporating Aymaran and Quechua stories alongside personal reminisces from the artists’ family members, Amaru’s Tongue: Daughter offers a prismatic portrait of indigenous traditions, echoing Chiquimamani-Condori’s belief that “life is a negotiation that has a textilic quality — we are woven into so-called ecologies and other things, braided together with what has been called nothingness, anti-matter.”

“In 2020, Elly came to me with the vision for a film to honor our late grandmother. The process involved a lot of planning, storytelling and reconnecting with our ancestors. There were a lot of emotional moments during the filming & editing process as we watched this vision come to life, many times exactly as we described during our extensive planning stages when the ideas were merely words, sketches or sounds. I hope this work continues to be medicine for anyone who has the chance to view it.” JOSHUA CHUQUIMIA CRAMPTON

Since releasing this film, the siblings have each released acclaimed music albums. In 2023, Chiquimamani-Condori self-released their monumental DJ E, and in 2024, Joshua put out the widely-acclaimed Estrella por Estrella. More recently, the siblings teamed up on Los Thuthanaka, a bold and distorted blast that Pitchfork called “a dizzying reorientation to the possibility of what music can or should sound like.”

Joshua Chuquimia Crampton and Chuquimamani-Condori are multidisciplinary Aymaran artists and musicians. Both siblings were born in California, where they still reside. Their family and land ties are in Allyu Pahaza, Calacoto de Pacajes and Provincia Nor Yungas Regions of La Paz, Bolivia. Their art has been exhibited at The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, MoMA PS1 and La Biennale di Venezia.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to John Stevens and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton.