Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
To talk about the way modernization and industrialization understand nature, I started developing works that originated from a series of visits to various sites, where rural landscapes and towns or cities meet. I was interested in registering these transitions, how these natural landscapes transform and become a place where nature is actually seen as a resource for extraction to creating capital value. I am interested in the rupture between culture and nature, which originated from modernism, and how nature has become a product to be exploited or merely analysed and controlled by science.
When it comes to the tension between public and private space in Peru I have explored, through some works, ideas around the privatisation of the landscape and the co-option of natural resources, reviewing the social impacts and bad distribution of resources. I am interested in tracing peoples’ adaptability around these conditions and how new forms of resistance arises from them. These changes to the natural surroundings eventually integrate into the broader cultural landscape. I think that the social and political phenomena, which happen around these new uses of space, are intrinsically linked to the culture and history of the place.
Some of these elements, of these resources, are always playing a part in my works, such as copper and bamboo. Copper is one of the main products in the Peruvian economy. We are the second biggest producers in the world and the largest exporters to China. I use copper as an object that symbolises a natural resource that is being largely exploited and commercialised in its industrial form. Through my work, the environmental and social impacts that the extraction policies imply are questioned, relinking copper with artisanal practices. Bamboo and reed are also elements that I use to create tension between industrial and natural materials. Bamboo is used in construction as a building material on the coastal parts of Peru, especially in the form of woven panels. Being an accessible material, it is often used to demark territory in land invasions, thus symbolizing a gesture of resistance against government neglect, particularly of indigenous and poor communities, and ongoing processes of cultural erasure that come with globalization.