The next Venice Biennale, which will be held between April and November 2024, is an edition that promotes a radical break with the most rigid views of contemporary art: for the first time a Latin American will assume the task of curating the exhibition. The Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa has made it clear that his appointment will not be an anecdote, as he has proposed that the 60th edition vindicate the figure of the foreigner and, in that sense, give visibility to the production of artists who are usually displaced and do not receive the same reflectors. “The queer artist, who has moved within different sexualities and genres and has been persecuted for it; the outsider, who is situated on the margins of the art world; and the indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in his own land,” Pedrosa has described. They will be the main protagonists of the event that will be called Foreigners everywhere.
Although they are not obliged, several countries have echoed Pedrosa’s call and will send immigrant, exiled, Afro-descendant, indigenous artists and even those whose roots belong to former colonies. This is the case of the Peruvian of Japanese descent Sandra Gamarra, who will be the first artist not born in Spain to represent Picasso’s country. The election of the United States will also be an event: for the first time in almost 130 years of the Venice Biennale, the North American pavilion will revolve around the work of an indigenous artist. This is Jeffrey Gibson whose origins are the Choctaw and Cherokee people. Ireland, for its part, will send the queer artist, Eimear Walshe. And the list goes on.
In Peru — a country where 55 indigenous peoples live in the Andes and the Amazon — the tenor of the election has been different. At the end of August, after analyzing 27 proposals, a jury determined that the winning project that will occupy the Peruvian pavilion in Venice is Cosmic Traces by the Lima-born photographer Roberto Huarcaya, founder and director of the Image Center for twenty years, and a regular participant in group exhibitions. and art fairs in Europe, America and Asia and with a past at the Venice Biennale: in 2001 together with the ceramist Carlos Runcie Tanaka and in 2016, when he set the space for the architecture event with Amazograms, a project that Huarcaya has been working on for a decade and which consists of capturing the shadows of nature on large format photosensitive papers. These frames are the starting point of Cosmic Traces.
The art historian Patricia Ciriani, one of the thirteen members of the jury of this competition organized by the Cultural Board of Peru, opposed the application of Cosmic Traces for two reasons: because although the photograms of Huarcaya are different, it is based on a an idea that is no longer unprecedented and because in his opinion it does not dialogue with Pedrosa’s purpose. “It’s like accepting that we don’t have much more to offer the world. His curatorial team is impeccable, but it is a project that Huarcaya has been recycling since 2014 and that promotes itself without needing Peru. Furthermore, it is exactly the opposite of the route that Pedrosa traces of revaluing marginalized artists and encouraging indigenous peoples to speak from his perspective instead of speaking for them. Which is what Huarcaya does from Lima: go to the Amazon and take a photographic print. It is like another way of reproducing the predation of native resources,” explains Ciriani.
Along the same lines, the artist from Loreto Christian Bendayán, who represented Peru at the Venice Biennale in 2019, maintains that in this edition “a door was opened that was closed for centuries for the voices always relegated, ignored and made invisible and that the Peru simply closed it” by not leaning towards proposals such as that of the Shipibo artist Olinda Silvano and Harry Chávez, called Koshi Kené (The Power of Kené), which came in second place. “Overcoming institutional and personal interests have meant that the guidelines of this biennial and the objective of competing for the Golden Lion are not prioritized; The lack of thematic coherence was already seen in the previous edition. We are talking about a pavilion of national representation, even if it is managed by a private institution. The absence of the Ministry of Culture contributes even more to the lack of representativeness of the country,” says Bendayán.
There have been those who have even criticized the appropriateness of the name, Cosmic Traces, such as the anthropologist Luisa Elvira Belaunde: “The jury has awarded first place to the use of English for a biennial that calls for celebrating coexistence with difference in all its senses and, especially, the thought of indigenous peoples.” Alfredo Villar, curator of Koshi Kené (The Power of Kené), the project led by Olinda Silvano that came just one vote away from defending the Peruvian banner in Venice, questions the structures of Peruvian art, reflected in how the jury was made up : thirteen members, all from Lima—except the Paraguayan Ticio Escobar—or from institutions in the capital, and only three women. “It is not only the dynamics of this contest, but the dynamics of the Peruvian artistic system that is centralized in Lima and made up of private organizations and mainly men. Let’s reflect on how prestige is decided and careers are validated in this country,” Villar criticizes. A significant fact about the contest is that a tiebreaker was necessary between Silvano and Huarcaya, since a jury was absent in the final vote.
Huarcaya’s version
Roberto Huarcaya answered our questions, along with Alejandro León, a member of his team. He assures that his project does fit the meaning of the biennial and Pedrosa’s thematic umbrella. “The curatorial proposal tells us about the other, about otherness from the level of migration, but also from not so literal levels. “We are taking the central curatorial proposal to the limit and we are assuming nature as a subject, as the great other in the chain of otherness,” argues Huarcaya. León seconds this: “We respect the criticism, but the theme of the biennial is not the indigenous peoples. And it is not a requirement either in the national competition or in the biennial. The issue is being a foreigner everywhere.”
In his defense, Huarcaya says that his exhibition will have an additional guest who will contribute a signature piece: it is a sculpture conceived by the renowned Antonio Pareja, an artist of Ayacucho origin. The strange thing is that Pareja’s presence does not appear in the Cosmic Traces presentation document nor is he part of the winning team, registered in the contest of the Cultural Board of Peru. Huarcaya insists that this work was discussed during the support and that it is not a last-minute decision in the face of reproaches. “We compete with the idea of the piece, not with the piece that is under construction. We have applied with an exhibition project,” says Huarcaya.
As for it being a recycled project, Huarcaya prefers to give the floor to León: “one thing is the frames from the past and another is what we will develop at the Venice Biennale. It is a new and specific proposal for the biennial. Let’s not get confused.” Regarding the use of English to represent Peru, León adds: “This may be questionable and we are aware. But English is the language most used internationally in the world of contemporary art and one of the official languages in Venice.”
Curator Max Hernández, member of the jury, is in favor of Cosmic Traces because in his opinion it will work in the Peruvian pavilion. “If you ask me if Roberto Huarcaya counts as an indigenous population, obviously not. But what the jury evaluated were curatorial projects, not whether the artist adapted to the general curator’s idea. I understand the discomfort, but it seems inaccurate to say that we have lost a great opportunity by not being represented with a project like Olinda Silvano’s, because there will continue to be biennials. The opportunities are not over.”
Olinda Silvano, a Shipibo artist with extensive experience, who has settled for decades in the native community of Cantagallo, does not crumble and says that she will continue to move forward with Koshi Kené (The Power of Kené), a project that is based on the ancestral design of the Shipibo people. konibo. “I will not deny that it hurt me not to have been chosen, but I will continue fighting. I may not have gone to university, but I protect the legacy of my ancestors, and I hope that is also valued. I’m not going to stay. The day will come when Peru will be represented at the Venice Biennale by an indigenous artist. “I believe in God and my ancestors.”
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