C2C Festival 2025, Day 3, Los Thuthanaka, photo: Fabiana AmatoFolding time
Los Thuthanaka at the C2C Festival
High Pitch18.11.2025review
Los Thuthanaka made a memorable late-night appearance at the C2C Festival in Turin on Saturday, November 1, held in the cavernous expanse of Lingotto Fiere, the former Fiat factory. The Stone Island stage pulsed at the center of the hall, separated from the main stage by an elongate corridor bathed in the shimmering glow of rotating disco balls. Sometime after midnight, the duo, Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, stepped into this charged atmosphere, clad in matching suits and cowboy hats. They took the stage after compelling acts, including John Maus, whose sonorous baritone cuts through minimalist synth-pop structures driven by looping bass lines, and XIII & Sabla, founders of the Gang of Ducks record label, renowned for their bass-heavy, techno-driven sound.
The stage itself prioritizes sound over performer: Funktion-One speakers rise like walls, pressing an overwhelming sonic intensity into the hall, while the DJs remain largely hidden behind the stacks. The visual barrier is deliberate: it immerses the audience in a tactile soundscape, where sensation takes precedence over spectacle. The stage's architecture and its sonic intensity work together to direct attention to the idea of music itself, deliberately de-emphasizing the performer's body to assert the agency of sound.
XIII & Sabla exemplify this approach by treating the body as a site of absent authority. Listeners are enveloped in the sonic material rather than attending to the performers' identities. John Maus, in contrast, thrashes across the stage, drenched in sweat, circling and banging his head to drive the music and electrify the audience. In his performance, the body becomes an amplifier for emotion. Los Thuthanaka take this logic even further in an epistemic disobedience, collapsing the binary between sound and spectacle: they merge visibility and sound, making their attire and presence inseparable from their music, enacting a form of embodied acoustemology in which the body, costume, and sonic textures work together.
Since the release of their debut album earlier this year, Los Thuthanaka has quickly established itself as a defining force in contemporary experimental music. The album earned Pitchfork's highest debut rating in five years, and Chuquimamani-Condori was awarded the Silver Lion at the 2025 Venice Biennale Musica, signaling the duo’s impact and technical mastery for their fusion of genres. An eager audience gathered that night at C2C, anticipating the chance to experience their music live, and the performance did not disappoint. It carried the album's density without feeling confined, with psychedelic guitar lines and club-oriented sound design merging traditional Andean rhythmic structures in a captivating manner.
"Phuju," a Huayño piece rooted in traditional Andean dance, served as one of the initial tracks. Syncopated guitar patterns drove momentum, while layers of electronic textures—including pre-programmed synth tones and gritty, lo-fi noise—thickened the sound. This track demonstrates their hybrid approach, blending Huayño with contemporary electronic manipulation and tapping into ancestral and speculative timeframes to craft a unique acoustic experience. The subsequent pieces maintained similar intensity, marked by a steady build-up of energy, with soaring guitars creating a trance-like flow. Traditional dance forms like caporal and kullawada, combined with glitchy noise and percussive strumming, defined the duo’s sonic terrain.
Both artists are siblings from the Pakajaqi nation of the Aymara people, whose lands extend across the Andean highlands of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. This cultural lineage informs their work as a cosmological continuity rather than mere heritage. They do not quote tradition but extend it, using sound as a medium for transmitting ancestral knowledge in the present. Their compositions eschew the linear view of time typical of colonial modernity, instead offering a feedback loop between past and future in which ancestry is embedded within the now.
In interviews, the duo emphasizes that, for the Aymara, the future is behind us, folding time rather than marching forward. The past stands known and visible in front, while the unseen future trails out of view. On stage, their sounds enact that turning: tones bloom and collapse, loops shed their own edges, rhythm becomes pulse, then memory. What first appears static is, in fact, folding in on itself.
Visually, the duo's stage presence was a shimmering kaleidoscope of vibrant hues, their clothing reflecting fluidity and celebration. While the initial impression might suggest a campy aesthetic, their performance transcends this interpretation. Instead, the vibrant excess represents a gesture of devotion, where ornamentation and rhythm are sacred acts. Their dedication to Chuqui Chinchay, the Aymara two-spirit deity of walking between two worlds, signifies a renewal of relations where queerness is acknowledged as a continuum rather than merely a subversion.
In this performance, queerness is not merely a gesture towards a yet-to-exist world but is grounded in both the future and ancestral past.11See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1–2, for a discussion of queerness as a horizon of potentiality. Los Thuthanaka traces a line of continuity across time, suggesting that queerness serves as both a possibility of the future and an ever-present origin—a force that history attempts to erase but cannot.
