A conversation with archaeometallurgist and jeweler Carole Fraresso, founder of Motché and curator of Inca. L’héritage sacré des Andes.
The gold we wear holds memory. Most often the memory is ours and it is recent. The piece that marked an occasion, the one that was a gift, the one that came down through a family.
For Carole Fraresso, archaeometallurgist, jeweler, and founder of Motché whose work we are proud to list on the Aracari Gallery, this personal chapter is a brief history, eclipsed by a far older story. In her world, gold does not start to have meaning when we acquire it. It was something before, and something before that.
“When you spend your professional life surrounded by objects conceived as offerings, intended to accompany the deceased or to clothe a ruler regarded as the son of the Sun, you cannot then consider gold as a neutral material, purely decorative or driven by trends.”
For five hundred years, the story of Peruvian gold has been a story of loss. Found, taken, melted down, gone. Carole tells it the other way around.
Who is Carole Fraresso?
Carole Fraresso holds a doctorate in archaeomaterials, completed in 2007, with research centered on adornment in the rituals of the Moche culture. She was a resident at the Institut Français d’Études Andines in Lima between 2004 and 2006, and has been associate scientific curator at the Museo Larco since 2009. She left France for Peru that same year and spent time since inside museum storerooms and at excavation sites along the north coast, handling, weighing and measuring ornaments that most people only ever see through glass.
Motché, her own house of Peruvian gold jewelry, followed in 2010, its first exclusive collection made for the Museo Larco a year later. The name points north, to the Moche, the culture whose goldwork she has spent a career inside.
We spoke to her about metal, memory, and a craft that never entirely stopped.
Beginning with the object, not the sketch
“I never begin with a sketch. I always begin with an object inherited from the past, most often one I have held in my hands in a museum storeroom, discovered in situ during excavations carried out by fellow archaeologists, or spent months documenting under a microscope.”
Whether it’s in vogue is the wrong question to ask of an object like that. What Carole asks is how the thing was made, and why anyone chose to make it that way. Because the answer, in the Andes, was never simply decorative. Metal was transformed into something with agency, animated by a vital force called camac or camay, always inside a ritual frame.
“When I create, I am not styling a motif, I am trying to understand the gesture behind it: the choice of precious alloy, the hammering sequence, the reason why a Chavín, Moche, or Chimú goldsmith chose to enhance it with bestiary or symbolic motifs through repoussé, chasing, or assemblages of movable pendants.”
“Design schools teach you to invent forms. Archaeology and material science, by contrast, have taught me to characterize and interpret forms that already exist, and to question their purpose within a specific cultural context.”
That distinction changes what arrives in the finished piece. “What passes from the object to the maker’s hand is not merely a motif, but a millennia-old savoir-faire, a gesture transmitted across generations, understood, and reactivated in the present.”
What makes Peruvian gold jewelry different?
Peru’s goldworking history spans roughly three thousand years and dozens of distinct societies, which would seem to force a maker to choose one. Carole chooses none.
“I do not base myself on a single culture, but rather on a millennia-old technical territory. Peruvian jewelry arts are dominated by what are known as techniques of plastic deformation: hammering, repoussé, chasing, embossing, among others. Gold objects were rarely cast in ancient Peru. Instead, the metal is worked cold, flattened, pushed and stretched into form under the artisan’s hand.”
This is the detail that surprises most people. The gold of ancient Peru was not poured. It was beaten. Sheets were hammered thin, worked from behind to raise a form, chased from the front to sharpen it, then cut, folded and assembled, often with small pendants left loose so the finished ornament moved and caught light as the wearer did.
“What inspires admiration today is the extraordinary degree of technical mastery these traditional gestures required to produce pieces of considerable size while retaining an extreme fineness and lightness. These skills, so difficult to replicate mechanically, are today at risk of disappearing.”
“I do not choose a style, I reveal a legacy of savoir-faire. I always start from the gesture, and it is the gesture that leads me to the culture.”
Why aesthetic comes after provenance
“Aesthetic comes afterward, shaped by symbols rooted in the Andean cosmovision or by an iconography specific to each civilization’s belief system: a medallion, for instance, may invoke the mythological Moche being associated with sacrifice and life’s regeneration. In the Andean world, technique and cosmology were inseparable, and a process was never chosen for its aesthetic effect alone, but because it could express what people want gold, this sacred metal, regarded as divine, to convey.”
A method, in other words, chosen for what it could say.
An ancient story of recycling
There is a decision at the center of Motché that looks, from the outside, like a purely contemporary one. The house works in recycled gold only. The reason Carole returns to is thousands of years older than the conversation we tend to have about it.
“Pre-Columbian gold was itself continually recycled. Ancient artisans melted the metal down, blended it, transformed it; gold was never truly new, it carried the memory of everything it had been before.
“Working with recycled gold is not a policy we added to Motché. It is the oldest gesture in the craft. We are simply doing, today, what Andean goldsmiths have always done: giving gold another life.”
The contemporary argument holds too, and Carole makes it plainly. Sourcing responsibly in Peru means confronting a mining landscape deeply marked by informal extraction, and a house honoring ancestral goldsmiths cannot be complicit in destroying the landscapes their descendants live in.
Fairmined-certified supply chains in the south of the country are opening fairer paths, and Motché is working toward them, with traceability and direct relationships with the communities and territories involved.
Nothing invented, everything traced
Giving gold another life is one thing. Knowing precisely which traditions and beliefs you are continuing is another, and it is where the years go.
“Knowledge is transmitted as much through gesture as through the stories that give it meaning; and for me, preserving Andean memory is inseparable from preserving the techniques that shaped it. That is why some of our collections, such as the Larco Collection or the Ucupe Collection, are the result of years of research devoted to the scientific study of Peru’s jewelry heritage. Each creation is grounded in a documented history: that of a culture, an era, a craft, sometimes even a private collection or an archaeological site whose forms it rigorously reinterprets.”
Both collections are named for real things. The Larco draws on the pre-Columbian holdings of the Museo Larco in Lima, a collection Carole spent her doctoral years inside. Ucupe refers to a discovery made in 2008 in the Zaña valley on the north coast, when archaeologists opened the burial chamber of a Moche lord found with an extraordinary quantity of ceremonial ornament. None of which is an attempt to reproduce what was found.
“I am not trying to reproduce ritual objects; what I am instead trying to convey is the intention that guided their creation: the idea that a piece of jewelry can be animated by a vital force, carry identity and memory, or even offer a form of protection to the person who wears it, in the same way Andean gold carried meaning for the one it adorned or accompanied.”
“I want every piece of jewelry to be told as much as it is worn. So that to the question ‘What is it?’, its owner can answer with a story rather than a brand name. Because to wear a Motché piece is to wear a living transmission, one in which the mastery of ancient cultures continues to dialogue with the hands of today’s artisans. It is not about following a trend, but about becoming the custodian of a heritage that endures.”
“This is not so much about mysticism as it is about respect for what metal can mean to an individual, or even to a community: a dimension that the luxury world has largely forgotten, and that pre-Columbian goldsmiths had never lost until it was taken from them by the sixteenth-century Conquest.”
On view now: Inca. L’héritage sacré des Andes
Carole is making the same argument this year on larger stage, as curator of an exhibition of 235 works at the Hôtel départemental des Expositions du Var in Draguignan, in the south of France. Built with the Museo Larco and drawing loans from the British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly and the Museo de Arte de Lima among others, it covers close to three thousand years, from Chavín through to the Inca. Some of the pieces have never left Peru before.
It is a rare thing to see this much of the Andean world gathered in one room, and rarer still to see it arranged by someone who has spent a career inside the objects themselves. It opened on June 20 and runs until September 27, 2026.
“As curator, I wanted to move away from the seductive but reductive narrative of Inca treasure, in order to reveal the deep time that underlies it, because what truly grounds the longevity of the Andean world, and even more so the success of the Inca Empire, lies in another dimension, one often harder for the Western eye to grasp: that of the sacred.”
Ritual, cosmological thought, technical knowledge and strategies for surviving some of the most demanding environments on the planet were elaborated over centuries by the Chavín, the Moche, the Nasca, the Tiwanaku, the Chimú and many others. The Inca were their heirs, their organizers and their transmitters, weaving that inheritance into a sacred order that gave the Tahuantinsuyo, the Quechua name for the Inca Empire, its strength and its cohesion. Set against three millennia, the empire itself lasted barely three centuries.
“The world, here, is not perceived as an assemblage of inert objects, but of living entities, bound to one another. Mountains, rivers, animals, ancestors, deities, and human beings all take part in the same order, the same web of the living. In this cosmology, gold itself is not a precious material meant to be accumulated; it is a sacred substance, carrying a vital force and a relationship to the divine.”
The exhibition follows a chronology, but its ambition lies elsewhere: a way of understanding how to inhabit the world, in which balance arises from the relationship between beings, technique is inseparable from belief, and every object reveals a conception of life grounded in interconnection, reciprocity and harmony.
Inca. L’héritage sacré des Andes is at the Hôtel départemental des Expositions du Var, 1 boulevard Maréchal Foch, Draguignan, until September 27, 2026.
A journey north from Lima
Guidebooks will tell you this story closed in the sixteenth century. Conquest, rupture, museum glass. What Carole wants a traveler to Peru to understand is close to the opposite.
“That it was never entirely interrupted, but that today it is at risk of being so. The guidebook version tends to present pre-Columbian goldsmithing as something that came to an abrupt halt with the Conquest, a closed chapter of history to be contemplated behind a museum showcase.”
“What I would want a traveler to understand is that this ancient tradition survived, fragile and fragmented, in the hands of isolated families who kept these gestures alive, often without institutional recognition, sometimes without even fully grasping the historical depth of what they were carrying forward.”
“If you go to Peru and visit the prestigious collection of the Larco Museum in Lima, or the remarkable collections of the Tumbas Reales de Sipán Museum and the Brüning Museum in the north of the country, you discover the past. But if you also seek out the workshops where certain lineages continue to work today, you become aware of the extraordinary vitality of this heritage: a living craft, fragile, and largely invisible to visitors who don’t know where to look.”
We have spent thirty years designing journeys through this part of Peru, north from Lima into the coastal valleys where the Moche, Sicán and Chimú worked gold for well over a thousand years, and into the collections that hold what they left. Seen in sequence, and with someone who can explain what you are looking at, they stop being treasure and start being evidence.
Which returns us to where we began, and to the reason five centuries of storytelling have had it backward.
“That, to me, is the true story of Peru’s Eldorado: not what was lost, but what today refuses to disappear.”
Discover Motché’s Peruvian gold jewelry, now available directly through the Aracari Gallery.