BEHIND TELEVISION:
THE NEW IMAGE OF PERUVIAN VIDEO ART
Guardship for the L.A. Freewaves Festival, Los Angeles, 2002.

By José-Carlos Mariátegui.
ATA Projects [High Andean Technology]

The beginning of electronic art in Peru occurred at the VIII International Festival of Video Art, organized by the Peruvian critic and art historian, Alfonso Castrillón, and Jorge Glusberg from the Art and Communications Center of Buenos Aires. This event was celebrated at the Continental Bank’s Exhibition Hall in Lima, directed by Castrillón, in September of 1977. However, after that first and favorable moment, electronic art came to an almost complete halt for nearly two decades, even though some sporadic and isolated interventions took place (Arias and Aragón, Esther Vainstein, Eduardo Villanes, among others).

A significant event materialized in 1995 when Gianni Toti came to Peru. Gianni Toti, one of the most important video artists on an international level, is an organic intellectual, one who confronts theoretical depth and cultural action in his untiring search for new languages in the artistic and scientific creation. As of 1996, Toti carries out the "Tupac Amauta" Project in Peru and France (CICV Pierre Schaeffer) which relates pre-Columbian and Andean thought with the present social struggle from a Latin American and World perspective.

Thanks to this international effort, Peru’s isolation started to be modified. In that year (considering the previously mentioned encounter of 1977 as a historical reference), the Second Video Art International Festival, organized by HAT (High Andean Technology) and the Visual Arts Gallery of the Ricardo Palma University, was celebrated in Lima. Ever since then, the festival has been celebrated annually, with a massive response from the public, confirming the great interest in new manifestations which art and technology can produce. Within this local context, the public presentation of video art requires a different positioning, both from the creators and from the curators. In this sense, it is undeniable that the modes of video art exhibition are fundamental: to see a monitor in a corner, or four parallel projections, defines different situations, many of them directly associated to a defined attitude. As Bruce Nauman tells it: "the video: a private medium in a public space".
That is why this approach is more focused on free creation (universal?), against the typical "Latin American content" cliché.

These young artists do not often wish to represent folkloric or typical elements or contents, but rather try to construct new forms of creation, analyzing their local context. That is, since the information and the perception of the information has been globalized, artists are allowed to work within a contemporary-western structure (Television, radio, Internet, publicity, etc.) similar to that of their colleagues in other parts of the world. This does not mean that perceptions of the local reality do not exist; what happens is that this reality is also transformed, mainly in the urban core, which, in the case of Peru, just as it is in a large part of Latin America, is where the great percentage of the people of the country live.
Art critic Gerardo Mosquera suggests, "this does not mean that a Latin American ‘look’, or certain similar lines of work occur, but these resemblances are going to be more similar at a conceptual or artistic level, than at the level of identifiable elements taken from folklore, history, religion or nationalism".

This new body of work is not only due to the development of new technologies, but also to the increasingly active participation of Latin American artists in international festivals and exhibitions of electronic art. Likewise, the recent proliferation of said events and encounters in Latin America has allowed the promotion of valuable exchanges among the region’s artists, curators and theorists, managing to re-define the Latin American cultural diversity.
The language of present video art in Peru is a complex (in)definition that allows for an (in)finite series of variants. Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate an experimental short work from an art video; many times it is simply impossible. Although Latin American media artists have not been able to completely overcome a minimal infrastructure for research and production, their position is not the same as it was a decade ago. Today, the low cost of electronic equipment makes the creation of works easier, with few resources, and allows the diversion of production costs of films to low budget productions, thus forcing the exploration of new ways of creation, alternative to the traditional format.

Perhaps the defining feature of the present production of video art in Peru lies in its heterogeneity, since, being in essence a new medium, there are no established traditions or historical references. This allows the young producers an unusual freedom in the Peruvian artistic environment. In present day Peruvian video there is no single conceptual line; that is why many of these works make use of the contrast or the decontextualization of a situation or image in order to re-create it. This transgressive vision of the real, reaffirms one of the most interesting characteristics in Peruvian electronic art: its direct relation with the local social surroundings (life itself) and the way in which it crosses spaces between the public and the private.

This young and renewed vision allows us to catch a glimpse of electronic art as one of the most promising panoramas of the visual arts in Peru.

This selection of videos and electronic art gives a sweeping vision of the trends which are still being formed and developed in the country, providing a clear reflection of the hybridism and richness of the current artistic proposals.