Today’s itinerary illustrated a series of organizations with disparate modes of approaching contemporary art.
- Corriente Alterna with Luis Lama.
- Panel Discussion with Jorge Villacorta and other affiliates of Centro de la Imagen.
- Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano with Pedro Pablo Alayza
- Fundacion Telephonica with Jose Carlos Mariategui
Our first stop of the day was at the art school Corriente Alterna with Luis Llama, who is director of the school as well as a curator and art critic. Llama promoted the school as being the most contemporary and experimental of all the art schools in Lima, as well as having the “best video art in Peru.” He said the largely female student body was partcularly interested in feminisms and representations of the body. While our group seemed to be more or less in agreement that we weren’t convinced of the modernity or experimental quality of the work presented to us, it perhaps calls into questions our own expectations for studio art educational practices and production.
The second visit on this trip to Centro de la Imagen yeilded a surprisingly enlightening panel discussion with Jorge Villacorta, biologist/geneticist turn art curator, and several other artists associated with Espacio la Culpable who also teach at Centro de la Imagen. The great value of this visit was how, collectively, these speakers provided much information toward the greater context which contemporary Peruvian art exists within, most directly related to class systems. The State educational system (more or less equivalent to our notion of public schools) and the teachers therein, they said, are in a rather terrible state of affairs, particularly regarding arts and creativity, which they called a “fascist past-oriented educational system” where teachers are wholly unpreparred to teach. Apparently to address this problem, the state tried to institute examinations to test teacher competency, but the unions are so powerful that they were able to go on strike – and win – aganst such oversight. They each expressed gratitude toward their experience with better private education, but acknowledged that such schools only serve about 10% of the population and that the vast majority of Peruvians are underserved in their foundational education. Here, the conversation shifted toward their collective desire to gain proper accredidation for the programs at La Imagen, as it provides a much needed alternate educational resources, but does not yet yeild any sort of officially recognized degree.
At ICPN with Pedro Pablo Alayza, we mostly revisited the now common theme of funding problems due to lack of state support, no tax breaks for donations, and no real system of corporate support. Interestingly, the ICPN produces exhibits at multiple spaces across the city (4-5?) but voices these funding complaints in lock-step with the other organizations we’ve visited. It would be interesting to see how their overall operational budget compares to some of the smaller projects we’ve visited, what with their ability to simultaneously administrate so many facilities.
At last, after hearing so much about the general arts philanthropy of Telephonica (in both Mexico and Peru) we finally got to pay them a visit. Frustratingly, however, we were hard pressed to mine any additional data, as we were pretty much presented with their standard public relations platform. We were given a tour of the current exhibit which featured experimentations with new technologies. As it was described to us, the idea behind the exhibit was that these artits were using these highly complex technologies to address fairly simple concepts. A crowd favorite was the circuit-bended roomba with a mounted camera that projected the image onto either wall beside it. The roomba wandered around a slightly elevated platform that the audience was invited to stand upon, to help “guide” the roomba into a red square in the center. Once inside, the roomba became “trapped” and attempted to escape. The piece addressed ideas of survellance and mechanical adaptation.
Also at Telephonica, our translator Janine was having a show which was curated by our Lima coordinator Emilio. We were invited to attend the show opening that night, and they offered to take us out for Pisco Sours at a hotel en el plaza de San Martin en el Centro de Lima. After a brief walking tour of the beautiful colonial historic center, we actually wound up having to forgo the original plan, and settle for havng a pisco in a german pub. In the center of lima. Amusing circumstances to try a traditionally peruvian cocktail.
The day’s events eventually lead into a discussion about what we were learning to be a general sense of identity confusion for the arts in Peru, which were both further illuminated and confounded by our discussion at Centro de la imagen. What with Peru’s embracement of the Incan past, but rejection of the contemporary native population, the claims of ‘experimentation’ that doesn’t seem terribly experimental by our cognitive expectations of experimental arts, and the revelations of caste systems providing or barring participatory access to the contemporary arts scene, we were hard pressed to establish a solid identity for the arts community in Lima, despite how small that community actually was. While the speakers acknowledge this sense of cognitive dissonance about melding the past and the present, it doesn’t seem to hinder their own sense of community identity. The sense of identity confusion seems to come purely from being an outsider looking in.
Joe
