Imagen y experiencia: El carnaval de arica como autorrepresentación festiva

After the Aymara migrations from the Andes mountains to the coastal cities of the Chilean Far North, which started in the 1960s, the Andean actors not only maintained festive links with their places of origin, but they also sought to reenact their expressive manifestations (festivals, rituals, dances and music) in urban areas. In Arica, the prevalence of these processes is manifested strongly in the celebration of the "Inti Ch'amampi, with the strength of the sun" carnival, a celebration that has shown to be an alternative form of communication and social interaction in heterogeneous scenarios, the exploration of which calls for a revision of the invisibility and alleged timelessness of Andean actors. In this scenario, we draw on the concept of performance -as a theoretical and methodological construct- which allows us to understand these expressive practices as strategies, or cultural resources, of social and symbolic communication, through which the Andean actors seek to represent themselves at a local and cross-border public space. At the same time, we underline them as corporeal phenomena or expressions that allow the transmission and display of image, esthetic and identity reference frameworks, from the lived experience of participants: Andean dancers.