Yanawan yuraqwan. Andean musical instruments in black and white

How to cite this work: Civallero, Edgardo (2025). Yanawan yuraqwan. Andean musical instruments in black and white. Archive edition. Bogota: El Zorro de Abajo Editora.

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This book (whose title, in Quechua, means "black and white") is a photographic and textual work dedicated to the traditional musical instruments of the Andes, conceived as a visual reflection on the materiality of sound and cultural memory. Produced entirely in black and white, the book strips the Andean landscape and its instruments of all chromatic reference, reducing them to light, shadow, volume, and texture, and revealing on their surfaces the accumulated history of centuries of human use. The absence of color acts as a method of decontextualization: without the warm glow of cane, leather, or wood, each object becomes essential form, a document of presence. The photographs do not show music, yet they evoke it; the aerophones, chordophones, and membranophones portrayed seem to speak through the silence of their cracks and traces, narrating from stillness their sonic and communal life.

The text accompanying the images introduces an ethno-organological perspective that engages in dialogue with the aesthetic dimension. In brief fragments, it reconstructs the material and cultural genealogy of Andean instruments. Drawing on archaeological findings, it traces the long history of membranophones and idiophones that established the rhythmic foundations upon which pre-Columbian aerophones — whistles, flutes, horns, trumpets, ocarinas — unfolded, up to the arrival of European chordophones that were rapidly absorbed into local repertoires. In the rural and urban communities that line the mountain range, many of these instruments continue to be built and played according to traditional canons, where Indigenous and Iberian features converge, shaping a mestizo yet coherent soundscape.

This work is not a catalogue, but a visual and conceptual essay on the breathing of the continent. Each image is both document and metaphor: the instruments, stripped of color, speak through their material; cane, wood, and leather become traces of memory; silence becomes resonance. What emerges is an archaeology of sound through light: the Andes, freed from excess and rendered in grayscale, reveal themselves as a vast mineral staff where every crack, every shadow, every taut string continues to sing.