Lisa Crossman
September 11, 2009
Beyond Landscapes: An Exploration of Environmental Art in Peru
Project Report:
My field research this summer was dedicated to the investigation of contemporary environmental or ecological artworks in Peru.[1] I had initially planned to explore art production in the following three distinct “ecosystems”: Lima (urban and coastal region), Huancayo and vicinity (Central Highlands), and Iquitos (Amazon). However, after visiting Ayacucho, I realized that research in the Central Highlands would demand more time than I’d allotted. Thus, I decided to forego work in this area and instead chose to focus on visual art and exhibition in and around Lima and Iquitos between June 17th and August 11th, 2009.[2]
My research consisted of some archival work, the documentation of current exhibitions related to my thematic exploration, and a number of discussions with art critics, curators, scholars, directors of cultural institutions, and personnel from environmental organizations.[3] I also attended the workshop “El arte es sólo una excusa,” which was taught by independent curator and art critic Emilio Tarazona and held at El Centro Cultural de la Católica. This course dealt with recent and historic issues that have impacted contemporary Peruvian art and criticism. My investigation this summer provided important background information that will be essential for future work in Peru.
As stated in my grant proposal, this examination was centered on answering the following questions: “What strategies have been employed in artworks that address the environment? Is art an effective tool in promoting awareness about certain issues or effecting positive environmental change? How can one frame a discussion about environmental art that defies the typical art historical categorizations of style and nationality? How are themes of the environment related to other social issues or events?” My primary goals were to refine a working framework in which to discuss the topic of environmental art and to achieve a more nuanced conception of environmental issues and the manner in which they are conceptualized and articulated in Peru. This investigation marks the beginning of what I intend to be a much longer study. I established a network of contacts that will be useful for later research and began to answer the aforementioned questions as they pertain to this case study.
Shortly before I arrived in Lima, indigenous protests had erupted in Bagua Province, located in Peru’s Amazonian region, in response to a governmental decree that would permit further development in the Amazon. The violence that ensued and the lack of communication between the government and indigenous leaders, reveals larger differences in how modernity, development, natural resources, and the Amazon as an ecosystem are conceived by distinct groups. Throughout my stay in Peru, stories about the impact of climate change and other environmental issues such as the pollution of La Oroya appeared in both international newspapers like The New York Times and national ones such as El Comercio. These reports and the incident at Bagua in many ways shaped the direction that my project took and spurred my interest in the relationship between conflicts over natural resources and growing concerns with local and global environmental issues.
I found that between the 1980s and the present there have been a number of artists, collectives, and exhibitions that have addressed such themes as development, the distribution of natural resources, and the local impact of environmental phenomenon like climate change. In Lima the interdisciplinary collective Signo x Signo’s work from the 1980s, Juan Javier Salazar’s paintings, mixed media and performance pieces from the last couple of decades and a variety of exhibitions in the past several years have touched on crucial issues spurred by local and global events. The development of established groups such as EPS Huancayo, art movements like no-objetualismo and conceptualism, and the growing significance of such media as accionismo have all impacted and come to characterize the strategies that individual artists, groups and curators have employed.
In Iquitos art production was defined more by painting and the use of ayahuasca.[4] Much of the art produced by artists from this region reflected on the natural world through visual representations of cosmology and popular urban depictions of Iquitos. Gino Ceccarelli, Christian Bendáyan, Rember Yahuarcani, and Victor Churay represent four established artists from Iquitos. While none of these artists define their work as “environmental,” their paintings reveal the complicated manner in which the natural and urban world are interconnected and a myriad of ways in which these connections are imagined. The young, indigenous painter Brus Rubio creates work that more directly confronts environmental issues such as deforestation and thus reveals another example of how this theme is articulated.
My research in both Iquitos and Lima confirmed the importance of ecological art and, more generally, art that deals with the relationship between urban and natural environments, development, and other key issues that reveal the intersection of culture, the economy, and the environment. The needed framework for a continuation of this project is one that highlights the individual nature of many projects that deal with this theme and their connections to important national or global events. This discussion must allow for a fragmentary and non-linear account of case studies that highlight the very complexity and ambiguity that terms such as environment and ecological art evoke.
1
[1] I employ the general term “environmental art” as a means to characterize art that responds to the relationship between people and their environment. Ecological art or arte ecológico is used to characterize art that addresses environmental problems and is intended to function politically either through intervention or reflection.
[2] After beginning my project, I soon realized how vital my contacts were for my research. As I didn’t have any contacts in Ayacucho or Huancayo and it was difficult to make connections in these cities, it seemed more productive to eliminate this “ecosystem” and focus on the other two locations, especially as I developed more contacts in cultural and environmental organizations in Lima and Iquitos.
[3] I had initially planned to meet with people working at The Nature Conservancy and ProNaturaleza. However, these interviews were never realized and I instead met with Daniel del Castillo, the director of the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonia Peruana (IIAP) in Iquitos Paul McAuley, the founder of Red Ambiental Loretana. These interviews were extremely helpful in understanding contemporary environmental issues.
Crisis in Progress: entre la inquietude y el espasmo at la galería ICPNA – San Miguel and the Exposición Amazonía at the Biblioteca Nacional are two key exhibitions that I documented.
[4] Ayahuasca is a hallucinatory drug that is made from Amazonian plants and tied to shamanistic rituals. The practice of taking ayahuasca has become popular amongst tourists as well and there are numerous tours devoted to ayahuasca rituals.