An important museum in Europe acquired a Peruvian work about our violence. Because?

Talking about art today in the world is talking about the Center Pompidou. Opened in 1977 in Paris, France, it is one of the places that gives the most importance to contemporary art. It could even be said that this museum is a piece of art in itself: its façade is a structure that imitates scaffolding, which does not reveal its “true” exterior. Thus, its apparent message is that it is constantly under construction. Because art, like everything human, is always transforming.

But this museum does not only think about European art. In recent days it was learned that the center, through its Moving Image area, acquired a set of pieces by Herbert Rodríguez (Lima, 1959). We are talking about “Ayacucho Genocide, 1987 – 2022”, a series of slides prepared in the 80s within the framework of the violence experienced in the country. The 76 slides, made to be displayed on an analog projector, are handcrafted and feature a combination of images and text. “Become a millionaire: buy – sell cocaine.” “Look beautiful. BALDNESS all year round.” “BINGO. Every minute, 10 children die,” say some of the messages from the author, who contrasts the harshness of the news in the newspapers of the time – often with bloody images – with the other messages spread, such as sex and success.

“Genocidio…” is part of the exhibition that Rodríguez presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The artist told El Comercio that, as it is an old format, with his curators Jorge Villacorta and Viola Varotto he decided to transform them into digital format, so that they were in constant projection. “What the Pompidou wanted was the video, the set of handmade slides with which I made this digital video; also an artist’s book that is my period record, where I made a kind of systematization of my resources of experimental use of photocopy,” said the artist.

In total, the organization acquired 27 graphic documents, showing the process of creating art. “It is a complex set that accounts for all my experimentation with photography of the time,” said Rodríguez. It is a set that portrays the various expressions of structural violence, what happened 40 years ago. In this way the French museum has not only received the art itself; It also has information about the context in which it was made.

Peruvian art in the eyes of the world

Why is one of the most important museums in the world interested in the work of Herbert Rodríguez? The artist, who already has pieces in international venues such as the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), Toluca Fine Art (Paris), Larivière Foundation – Latin American Photography (Buenos Aires), among others, has an idea of ​​the reason.

“I believe that what exists is attention, looking at the proposals that emerged in a complicated period in Latin America, which is the context of violence, the chaos that this violence generated and the entire dense issue of poverty in the region. , and how autonomous creativity emerged. That is to say, there was not this repetition of the European canon to make aestheticistic and self-absorbed works, but rather this critical and creative look at what was happening at the time,” says Rodríguez.

The artist says that, according to a French curator whose name he prefers not to mention, the Pompidou’s acquisition of his works demonstrates how dynamic the museum is. “What happens is that outside Peru there is a very intense dynamic of reform of museums and collections, addressing the paradigm shift. Now we talk about global art history, not the universal history of who repeated what was done in Europe outside Europe, but what happened in contemporary art beyond.