information / gallery

“Trujillanidad” in sight

by Diego Otero

In There’s something about northern Perú two of the most talented artists from Trujillo today go deep into the labyrinths of northern identity –the marinera dance or the spring festival for example- to reflect on how the social dynamics in a specific context can turn into material for an artistic discourse. The curator of the exhibition is Augusto del Valle and it is presented at Sala Miró Quesada in Miraflores.

I. It is the big street parade: the main event of the Spring Festival. The moment of the year everybody has forgotten throughout the other three seasons and which is only remembered every October, suddenly, like an old routine. A moment that repeats itself for more than 50 years and that shows, from its material quality, the relationships between space and individuals, and amongst them and the different social groups. So, hours before the whole thing begins, many of the neighbors from the streets where the parade goes by take out stools, chairs, sofas, or armchairs, so they can comfortably watch. Because watching makes them participants.

And this is precisely what Cortijo takes as a starting point in Every spring, one of the four photographic installations included in There’s something about northern Perú, which is a kind of visual essay about the involuntary machinery of revelation and representation that those seats, set up in the street, embody. The gesture of taking a velvet sofa and placing it on the sidewalk, the possibility of stopping in the worn textures of a plastic stool, etcetera. Also because, like Cortijo and Vega say, “to claim the space that belongs to us inside the group to state, however possible, our belonging to it, makes the parade a clear example of our eclectic and mestizo national identity”. The parade is, as they call it, a strange hybrid of a yankee parade and the carnival parade from Cajamarca. And between those extremes we all stand, watching.

II.
Jano Cortijo, winner of the National Art Biennial in 2000, and Alice Vega, awarded a prize in the Trujillo Regional Competition of the same year, have been working together for quite a long time. Between 2003 and 2004 they organized and managed an art space called the office, where they tried to break ground for video and photography in the margins of an artistic establishment still ruled by the conceptions of the fine arts. Both graduated in Mass Communications, and their work has in common a great potential for dialogue: while she is interested in rummaging in the exterior and cartographical, he sharpens his aim towards the interior. In that sense, then, their visions about Trujillo are complementary.
In Every spring, like we said, Cortijo proposes the paradox of talking about individual identities from their absences in social spaces –and about the friction that is generated in that environment-, but in his other installation, ironically titled This is how my men from Trujillo dance, what the artist proposes through a video is a conclusive and synthetic exercise of reflection about the rigidity of traditions. What makes these traditions, inherited and founded in the collective memory, be able to remain impervious to any possibility of change or development?, Why do they simply repeat themselves trying to keep their original forms, as if the slightest change could hinder the socializing task that these kind of rituals involve?

In This is how my men from Trujillo dance, Cortijo offers a space of alterity: that is to say, he changes the rules of the game (the canons) of the tradition of placing instead of the typical marinera danced by a man and a woman, one performed by two men. ¿What is the effect of this swerve?, What support of the tradition is broken?, What effects does it generate? For Cortijo, in that sense, the futility of two men dancing can be the same of a traditional dance that more and more people remember less and less with each passing year and even a lot less people try to make it endure. Is there, necessarily, a logic in the development and the consolidation of a tradition? The artist does not offer answers, but his work offers a caustic effect.

III.
The two photographic installations by Alice Vega are closer to the angle of the documentary and the urban intervention. They are less ironic but more exhaustive pieces, and create a poetic discourse about “trujillanidad” (being from Trujillo) from contextual and concrete characteristics about the city and its inhabitants. In Parking lot, Vega starts off from the idea of calling attention upon the inexorable architectural deterioration that turns Republican houses in the historical downtown in Trujillo into parking lots. Thus, on the night of January 25th 2003 she decides to perform an intervention in which, with huge print letters, she projects the word “estacionamiento” (parking lot) over the façades of some key buildings: the Cathedral, the National School Santa Rosa, the City Hall and the National Culture Institute all of them in Trujillo. In “I come from a town where lethargy rules”, Vega approaches the vision of two men from Trujillo who have made a living by keeping the memory of the city through photography. One of them, Carlos Muñoz, is the photographer dedicated to making portraits of weddings or anniversaries, of the Spring and Marinera Festivals beauty queens, and also passport photos, whereas the other, Gonzalo García Monterroso, wanders about town snapshooting every social or institutional event that occurs in Trujillo. The documentary gaze of Vega insists in the fact that tradition has not questioned the worth of these photographers’ gaze, turning them, instead, in the only ones in charge of recording the images that go on defining the visual identity of the city.

IV.
Behind these proposals, with their doses of sarcasm or criticism, of questioning or denouncing, there is an element that looks like a backdrop but which in turn is the real protagonist: the echo and the remains of modernization which act as splinters in the logics of the machinery of the traditions. ¿Why is Muñoz the studio photographer of Trujillo and García Monterroso the events photographer?, ¿What can allow that a Spring Festival –with a beauty queen and parade- survive and a historical house be turned into a prosaic parking lot?, ¿Why do these rituals of tradition have to be the way they are?, ¿How would they be if they had to be otherwise? The Trujillo of Cortijo and Vega is a metonymy of the world, and it is that which mobilizes us.

originally published in the Sunday supplement of Diario “El Comercio”
on the occasion of the exhibition “There’s something about northern Perú”
Lima, Peru July 17th, 2005