information / gallery

The construction of routine

by Jano Cortijo

Waking up. Getting up. Going to the bathroom. Getting dressed. Having breakfast. Going out. Walking. Taking a bus/the underground/a cab. Going to work/school/university. Beginning the day. Routine. The same as yesterday’s. And tomorrow’s.

The activities that we have built our daily tasks with, along with the people and places that we have involved in them, create a limit, eventually define and ultimately explain what/who we are. That is how we prefer to keep a supposedly healthy distance that only allows us to identify and recognize our surroundings in the exact measure.

Combating routine is the only collective crusade in which most of us earthlings seem to have agreed upon. Overlooking –even denying- all the time and effort that took us to construct our own and personal familiarity we dedicate ourselves to look for ways, manners and approaches of getting out of it. The only thing that we end up strengthening is the fearsome vicious circle of the quotidian.

This is what Alice Vega talks about in 25 years / 25 days the project she will exhibit at the Kunstmeile in Krems at the end of March when her art residency finishes in the Austrian city.

She was selected to be the third Peruvian artist to develop a project during her stay and present it at the end (she was preceded by Juan Pablo Murrugarra and Cecilia Jurado in 2003 and 2002 respectively) Vega will present an installation with photo and video images that recreate the environments of the uses and customs we use to establish contact with the urban environment where we find ourselves.

The title alludes to the time it took the visual artist to construct her own routine in Trujillo and the time it will take her to do/accomplish the same in Krems, both, cities with an important historical legacy, recognizable mainly in the constructions of their respective urban centers.

To talk about this aspect in particular, Vega performed a public intervention in the historical downtown of Trujillo exactly one year ago projecting the word ESTACIONAMIENTO (PARKING LOT) on four local buildings: the cathedral, the City Hall, The National Institute of Culture and the Santa Rosa school. The purpose was to make evident the progressive loss of historical buildings in the city and their inexorable conversion into parking lots, an ironic ending for places where the last features of our amalgamated cultural identity remain. Seeing the word on the imposing facades of the City Hall and the Cathedral made us think inevitably about how these institutions considered important, fundamental even, for the life of the community of Trujillo evidence an ideological halting similar to that of accumulating cars in a vacated space.

More than just specifically referring to their collective or personal management, the artist was talking about the literal stillness that affects these institutions that shape, direct and guide the activities of the local population, a human group that remains indolent to the progressive and systematical eradication of all traces of historical and collective identity in favor of adopting a supposedly necessary modernity.

Around the same time, the artist submitted to the National Video Competition “Humboldt: traveling and the transparent look” the video installation project Parallel direction a visual discourse that was awarded the first prize due to its coherent resolution of the concept of erosion of the gaze upon the quotidian landscape in a spatial proposal that transfers the spectator to the place of the passenger in a public transport vehicle.

The work consists of the parallel and simultaneous projection of two videos that document both sides of the journey from any vehicle on the way to the stretch of El Cortijo in the apparently endless Mansiche avenue in Trujillo.

The prize awarded by the Goethe Institute was a two month scholarship for Germany, an opportunity that occurred almost simultaneously with the invitation from Galerie Stadtpark to present the project 25 years / 25 days, a work that will bring the European public closer to a proposal of contemporary Latin American art far removed from the pictorial-dream like cliché.

Alice Vega is an artist who has shown an unusual perseverance and conceptual rigor in her local environment to develop a body of work that combines a serene visual attractiveness with a questioning interest on what constitutes our identity.

article about the exhibition “25 years / 25 days” by Alice Vega originally published in “La Industria”, Trujillo, March 2004