We have learned to see ourselves through the Western gaze and through fabricated images, where the notion of “the savage” has been used as a historical strategy of colonial power.
Territories and peoples were portrayed as savage and primitive—bodies and landscapes to be domesticated, “civilized,” and possessed.

Savages; the Others is a series of drawings depicting portrait and erotic huacos, approached through historical and visual analysis to challenge the association of “the savage” with native cultures.

The sensibility of our ancestral peoples went far beyond realism: they had the capacity to love their bodies, to share that love, and to celebrate their sexuality. Thus, the savages are the others.

3 panels of
1 of 40.1 x 39.3 x 4
2 of 40.1 x 37.4 x 4 each
Based on Moche erotic ceramics, these suspended
fabric banners enlarge fragments of intertwined
bodies until they become nearly abstract zones
of contact. By scaling up gestures of pleasure,
care, and reciprocity, Coca reclaims a visual
vocabulary historically misread or sanitized
through colonial and heteronormative filters.
The banner—traditionally a symbol of authority
and conquest—here becomes a soft, porous surface
where desire is affirmed as a form of knowledge,
tenderness, and resistance. The works propose an
alternative genealogy of intimacy grounded in
pre-Columbian expressions of the erotic.