Mopa Mopa Images, Materiality, and Orality in the Colonial Andes

In the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries, native northern Andeans created dense compositions of flora and fauna punctuated by translucent, metallic colors. These images, which display pre-Hispanic, European, and even Asian techniques and motifs, decorate wooden objects of domestic use, such as trays and chests. The artists achieve exciting surface quality effects using a unique resin known as Barniz de Pasto or mopa mopa. Coveted by Europeans and Creoles for their lustrous surface finish and cosmopolitan flair, mopa objects traveled through the Andean cordillera and found their way to Europe.

The scant scholarship on mopa images focuses on identifying the cultural origin of their motifs as European, Asian, or pre-Hispanic. In this paper, I investigate the pre-Hispanic significance of the mopa image-making technique, an important part of which consisted in chewing the resin to clean it and mix in pigments. After being chewed, the resin was stretched by hand into thin sheets, and then cut and pasted to form complex compositions. Considering that the production of mopa images was but one of several Andean practices relying on the mouth, I propose that the use of the mouth as a site of production—not just a site of consumption—is directly tied to the primacy of oral discourse in Andean culture, a non-textual culture before the arrival of the Spanish. Therefore, transferring Asian and European motifs to mopa images by chewing resin is not merely copying or interpreting, but embedding them within an Andean epistemology.