"Apu" is an exploration of the iconography of Cerro Rico de Potosí, focusing on the repetition (and difference) within an accumulation of emblematic representations that are both worn and trivialized. It's a reflection on the modes, flows, and fractures of the image—from the subjectivity of the gaze—in contemporary Bolivia.
The production of bricks has a history, with various predecessors. The idea that the Tiwanaku people developed cement seems more improbable to us than stories of extraterrestrials. We contemplate this while repeating the imagined antiquity, more like the precariousness of madness made manifest.
We weren't seeking salt, but something less controversial—a culture exemplary in many senses, with its myths and the representations made by travelers. Dictionaries, documentaries, sociology books about the first humans. However, what we found was a series of poorly disguised lies throughout a system of audiovisual representation of the last government, but also of all governments. This film is about our precarious system of lies and our questions about what might be underneath or in front. In this case, in relation to salt, lithium, myths, mythologies, and mystifications.
