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.
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.
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1
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
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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 noobjetualismo 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.
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.
3
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.
4