Checan Moche

A research project exploring how Mochica erotic ceramics have shifted and re-emerged in Peru’s collective imagination.

Checan means "love" in Muchik, the language of the Moche people. These pre-Columbian erotic vessels were once sacred, symbolic, and explicit, depicting sex not as taboo, but as part of a larger cosmology. Today, they occupy a more complicated space: both cultural artifact and spectacle.

The “erotic room” in museums was always the giggly moment during school trips, the place where we were not allowed to enter as kids. It carried a strange tension: curiosity, censorship, embarrassment. Years later, the vases returned to the public eye in a very different form, when the mayor of a city built a giant replica of one of the vessels, complete with an exaggerated phallus, in order to attract more tourists. It was a huge success. People lined up in their cars to take selfies with it and it sparked a conversation around the erotic vases.

There’s something fascinating and deeply telling about this: a country still largely Catholic, shaped by conservative social policies, embracing a hyper-visible, sexualized image of its pre-Columbian past. This project explores the intersection of eroticism, history, and power, and how images, especially those rooted in ancient cultures, never fully belong to us. They shift, resurface, and are continually reimagined, transforming endlessly, beyond our control.