Jorge Eduardo Eielson at the House of Literature: a dream wrapped in a large blue cloth

Upon reaching the House of Literature on foot, walking along the Carabaya street, you can see the face of Jorge Eduardo Eielson framed by the facade of the emblematic building. Once inside, we are welcomed on the hall floor by an installation titled “Firmament”, which shows a sphere placed on top of a base. And in the latter, the first thing one reads is a verse by the centenary poet: “I don’t write anything.”

This is how the exhibition opens to our eyes “My name is still Jorge,” one of the several tributes with which the 100 years of Eielson, a fundamental figure of the 20th century in our country, are being celebrated. A creator who knew how to move between poetry, narrative, plastic arts, performance, theater, music and more disciplines.

The House of Literature exhibition can be divided into two parts. The first, in a room located to the left of the entrance, is a brief but significant approach to the Eielsonian heart. “It is an exhibition especially aimed at young people and children who do not necessarily know the author”explains Rodrigo Vera Cubas, curator of “Still my name is Jorge.”

“Here we find a small selection of his visual poems – continues Vera –; another piece that draws on conceptual art, since you can tear off the leaf of a poem to fan yourself; some fabrics that are drawn to show some verses, suggesting the ideas of knotting, tension and concealment that abounded in his work; and some photographs of Eielson and his pieces, such as references to pre-Hispanic cultures, through quipus or funerary bundles.”

CREATIVE COMPLICITY

The second part of the exhibition – although also its starting point – was by the artist Carlos Runcie Tanaka. It is an installation that in turn could be separated into two parts: one with the sphere mentioned at the beginning, which is inlaid with quartz and seashells; and the other in the form of a huge blue cloth, 130 meters long, which rises between the columns of the House of Literature.

This is an installation that adapts a previous one that Runcie Tanaka presented in Florence, Italy, in 2021. The artist says that it was born above all “as an emergency”, and in homage to the author of “Kingdoms”, with whom he was quite close in life. “It is a conversation from a distance with him, based on an emotional appreciation, very sensitive”Explain.

Runcie affirms that he has worked on the project with a certain ease associated – more than with words – with sound and images. “There is a freedom that perhaps comes from ignorance –he points out–. Because I did not pursue plastic arts studies. And neither did Eielson. He had great seriousness, but at the same time a very playful, quite free spirit.”

In fact, Runcie Tanaka and Vera Cubas are already planning for the coming weeks a kind of performative action in which the blue fabric can extend between the other columns of the venue, over the heads of the visitors, and reach the old platforms located in the back of the old Desamparados Station. “Even me I would like to get a lot more fabric, tie it to the train car, and take it to Huancayo, to the mine. Would be wonderful! Juan Javier Salazar, where are you?! jokes Runcie.

Thus, seen in panoramic form, the exhibition begins with “I write nothing” as an introductory verse, and ends with the visual escape of the blue fabric. “It is like an ethereal moment,” says Rodrigo Vera, “in which the fabric drips on the stairs and enters into perfect dialogue with the poem that we have placed on its steps: ‘I am moved / by everything that is wet / or by what seems impossible / and is only blue’”.