| Via
Satelite
Is an touring exhibition co-produced
by the Cultural Centers of Spain in Lima and Montevideo,
which is also joined by the Fundación Telefónica
of Buenos Aires, the Museo de Arte Moderno of Santo
Domingo, the Museo de Arte of Panama, the Museo de Arte
y Diseño Contemporáneo of San José,
the Fundación Telefónica of Santiago and
the Centro Cultural de España in México
City.
This common effort is a consequence of
the necessity to expand the concept of cultural cooperation
and to increase Latin American dialog in the cultural
field. It is truly sad that, in this globalization era,
determined brands of artistic product are imposed, depending
not only on the quality but mostly on the “made
in” tag. The creations of contemporary art being
produced in countries with cultural richness such as
Peru remain unknown, first by its neighboring countries
them, and, second, in Spain that, by obvious reasons
of historic and linguistic characters, should be the
main screen to its European circulation.
There are countries that by determined
politic, esthetic or location peculiarities are popular
and others that are not. Sadly, Peru falls in the second
group and with no reason at all. This is not a “lamentation”;
it is the verification of a fact. Peru is more interesting
because of its strong historic and folkloric heritage
than because of its contemporaneity.
Most of the international exhibitions
are similar because they are made by the same curators
and being attended by the same artists; what we see
are like repeated figures of the same album, in which
the ”popes” consecrate and the rest repeat
the same drones. The international language becomes
homogeneous, contradicting itself. It is necessary to
discard equalizing “marks” so the knowledge
and the appraisal of art can flow in an enriching way
in terms of quality and real cultural communication.
In this way, Via Satelite is not a randomly selected
title, it’s a proclaim.
Peru has a historic tradition in the photography
field that anyone could envy, not only because Chambi
is an indisputable international figure, but since Courret
and the Vargas Brothers, there has been a conducting
line of the Peruvian still image, that has never declined
in its esthetic quality, its power of fascination and
the risk of being constantly avant-garde: José
Casals, Jorge Deustua, Billy Hare, Roberto Huarcaya,
among others, all the way to the young photographers
included in this exhibition.
Miguel Zegarra, curator of the photographic
section of Via Satelite, conscious of what is expected
in foreign countries about Peruvian photography, recaptures
this line transmitting in his selection freshness, novelty
and risk, and deepening in the inherent concerns of
seeking towards an identity that cannot be solved in
the social field, but in the individual stance, inherent
to the differentiation of classes, of racism, aspects
that defined the concerns of Peru in the 20th century.
Video art, because it is a new technique,
has not yet generated what we can call a “history”,
although the hybrid installations by Francisco Mariotti
and the contributions in video by Rafael Hastings in
the seventies are a good foundation for the development
of the recent Peruvian video art scene. As artists become
perfectly adapted to the routine of an absolute relevant
still image, they have been able to add new possibilities
to this artistic technique that, through massification,
has ended lots of the time in jokes, anecdotes, grace,
and cinematographic simulation.
These are the defects that curator Jose-Carlos
Mariategui, one of the biggest experts of the Latin
American video art, has left out of this exhibition
to make a selection of Peruvian authors that get their
works to be not only the result of a serious research
around the language of video, but that contribute to
specific singularities that open doors and generate
new lines of work and of esthetic conceptions to follow.
We hope that Via Satelite will be the
starting point and adequate platform in the appraisal
of Peruvian art at the beginning of the 21st century,
and that its place in the contemporary world will be
properly recognized by the merit of its achievements.
Ricardo Ramón Jarne
Director
Cultural Center of Spain in Lima - AECI
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