Professor Dorota Biczel, PhD (Barnard College)
A New Icon for a Transformed Metropolis: EPS Huayco, Sarita Colonia, and Emancipatory Promises of Migrant Visual Cultures in the 1980s Lima
In my talk, I examine the ambitious project by the Peruvian collective EPS Huayco known as Sarita Colonia—a massive portrait of the folk saint worshipped by the underclasses of Lima constructed out of 12,000 recycled cans of evaporated milk on the mountain slope overlooking the Pan American Highway, on the outskirts of the city, in October 1980. In the local artistic context, Sarita Colonia constituted an unprecedented gesture. A monumental work of art created as ephemeral and temporary was displaced from the sanctioned gallery circuit in the upper- and middle-class neighborhoods to the city’s periphery, facing one of the principal routes of migration from the economically impoverished provinces to the capital. It also celebrated a popular heroine, venerated by those very migrants. Consequently, in Peru, Sarita Colonia is celebrated as the paradigmatic example of a long-sought-after “authentic” Peruvian form of cultural expression that simultaneously epitomizes the pinnacle of the Peruvian “socialist utopia” (1976–81)—that is, the moment of struggle for a radical democracy curtailed by the eruption of the Internal Conflict.
In contrast, I show that despite EPS Huayco’s self-professed emancipatory goals, their project largely reproduces the engrained nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural construction of race in Peru as inscribed in the country’s specific geography. In that sense, it constructs the urban migrant as an inherently racialized “other”—the one who laboriously supports the state while perennially remaining its outcast. Thus, Sarita Colonia foreshadows the impending disarticulation of leftist politics and the collapse of Peru’s social democratic transformation in the 1980s.
Thursday, December 5th, 2024
6:30 pm, EST
in Schermerhorn 934
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