Las Awichas in Shanghai
The awichas have arrived in Shanghai. Andean grandmothers and Yakumama, the mother of water, move through the skyline beside the Oriental Pearl Tower. Violeta “Jaguar” Ayala’s mixed reality work carries Andean memory into a global city and opens public space to other worlds.
Las Awichas is a mixed reality work by Violeta "Jaguar" Ayala. In the Andes, awichas are grandmothers. They hold memory, language, and care. Ayala generates them with AI and brings them into physical space through code she writes herself. Las Awichas is her first self-coded work.
In Shanghai, the awichas and Yakumama, a whale whose Quechua name means "mother of water," inhabit the skyline facing the Oriental Pearl Tower. Glass towers and Andean beings share one frame. Viewers meet a city populated by another cosmology.
The work grows from Neo-Andean Futurism and ch'ixi, an Andean idea of difference that coexists without fusing. Technology here is a tool for imagining new relationships between bodies, environments, and worlds. Las Awichas has shown in London, Sydney, and at the Guangdong Museum of Art.
About the exhibition
- Exhibition: SURREALITY: Realm of Fantasy
- Presented by: Computational Media and Arts (CMA), HKUST (Guangzhou)
- Alongside: UbiComp / ISWC 2026
- Venue: Shanghai International Convention Center, Shanghai, China
- Dates: October 11–15, 2026
- Works: Las Awichas, Yakumama
- With thanks to: Professor Pan Hui
About the artist
Violeta "Jaguar" Ayala is a Quechua-Bolivian-Australian filmmaker, artist, and creative technologist based in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Her practice spans two decades across documentary, virtual reality, mixed reality, and computational art. She is the first Quechua member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a 2026–2027 Mozilla Fellow. She co-founded United Notions Film with Dan Fallshaw and runs Koa.xyz, a computational creativity lab. Her framework, Neo-Andean Futurism, brings Andean cosmology into emerging technology.