Local spaces and transcendental spaces of conversion: the Carabuco Post-production and the performative production of transcultural epistemologies

The monumental paintings of the Postrimerias [Four Last Things] from the church of Carabuco (1684) serve as objects to study the complex dynamics of the visual and performative production of religious knowledge in a colonial contact zone. The article presents different readings' of the series that focus on possible uses and receptions of the paintings by local actors. These readings are based, on the one hand, on the idea of conceiving the series as a cycle of meditation' and product of the influences of Christian mysticism that played an important role in the eschatological politics of conversion' of the southern Andean Highlands. On the other hand, the paintings relate the eschatological message with the local hagiographic narratives of a pre-Hispanic apostle associated simultaneously with the Christian apostle Bartholomew and the Andean deity Tunupa-the most important figure of Aymara mythology. These works therefore represent objects of memory that participate in the local construction of time and space and that refer not only to Christian eschatological concepts but also to local Andean ontologies.