“This is not art; This is punk”: Peru opens an exhibition at the prestigious Venice Biennale

When one finishes mounting an exhibition in any pavilion corresponding to one of the different national representations at the Venice Biennale, the question inevitably arises about how it is going to be received and understood by people from other parts of the globe, without being linked to the country.

The question is indicative of the moment when you discover that curation is also a form of translation. A curatorial proposal such as “Peace is a corrosive promise”, which brings together a part of the production of the Peruvian artist Herbert Rodríguez, made in the period 1985-1990, is of immediate translation for foreigners who see it.

“This is not plastic art; this is punk”, Tom Seymour wrote a couple of days ago, with crystal clarity and conviction, in the article in “The Art Newspaper” that proposed the ranking of the six pavilions that one “should not miss in the Arsenale”.

The attitude that infuses energy, power and rage into all this agitation-propaganda material is instantly captured by 80% of visitors to the Peruvian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, through the experimental nature of its use of techniques such as collage , photomontage, photocopying, screen printing and stenciling in a hybrid to which Rodríguez often added pictorial gestures of evident bravery. Everything was done on 100% perishable paper, and it’s already going through 40 years of amazing conservation in the artist’s archive.

One can say – although it seems hyperbolic – that there is nothing like it in the entire biennial. By saying this I do not intend to appear as someone who boasts of having seen all the exhibitions of the event; Neither would Viola Varotto, my co-curator. She has seen and loved the Chilean pavilion, a transdisciplinary study of the mob and the culture of the Selk’nam around her, in a union of wills in pursuit of something beyond art. The pavilions of Spain (post-conceptual and institutional criticism by Ignasi Aballí), Belgium (painting and moving image by Francis Alÿs) and France (installations and film by Zineb Sedira) greatly attract me. All these testimonies from hundreds of people of various nationalities and ages who spontaneously and emphatically give their version of a journey through these waters of international contemporary art have confirmed for us how unique the Peruvian pavilion is.

That 80% also confess to knowing very little about Peru and its recent history. A few remember the violence that tragically swept our country in the 1980s and well into the 1990s.

I have been co-curator of the permanent exhibition of the LUM (together with Natalia Iguiñiz, Ponciano del Pino and Víctor Vich), which was described by the journalist Aldo Mariátegui in the magazine “Caretas” as a “decaffeinated” version of the history of the period 1980- 2000 in Peru. I think that there is no way to apply this adjective to the material that houses the pavilion today and that will remain on view for seven months until November. And all in the same biennial in which André Breton’s “Nadja” is included in “The milk of dreams”, the central exhibition designed by the event’s curator, Cecilia Alemani.