Reading time: 3 minutes
05.06.2018
por La Culpable
May 1, 2018 – May 31, 2018
Every month Marginalia invites an artist, curator or project to provide a series of images that will serve as the background of Terremoto, in relation to their practice and current interests. At the end of each month, the identity of our guest is revealed and the whole series of images is unveiled.
La Culpable (Lima, 2002 – 2008)
La Culpable was an artist-run space that emerged in the city of Lima, which began as a large and interdisciplinary group. After initial meetings, the “official” members were: Armando Andrade, Pablo Hare, Gilda Mantilla, Philippe Gruemberg, Luz María Bedoya, Flavia Gandolfo, Raimond Chaves and Rodrigo Quijano. Within the mutations of that group, Miguel López and Eliana Otta subsequently integrated to it.
La Culpable responded to the urgent needs of the city of Lima in a context following the internal war and the Fujimori dictatorship. Questioning what was understood as art from the conservative elitism of the galleries, La Culpable opted to articulate proposals that moved away from the artistic and closer to citizen and neighborhood activism to generate horizontal spaces of discussion, exchange and socialization. Emisiones [Emissions], a program of video projection through the televisions of the bar Juanito, was emblematic from the first moment. It was en approach to the immediate context, to the daily life from where the projects arose, an initiative to expand the spaces imagined for “the artistic”. La Culpable participated in the carnival organized by Proyecto Barrio, playing music and cheerfully resisting the privatization of public spaces. La Culpable was resisting to this neoliberal notion with the organization of Mercados de Pulgas [flea markets] and the activation of a Sala de lectura del Barrio [neighborhood reading room], an open space for meeting and reading, in the middle of Malecon Barranquino and its streets with lattices. The famous festivities also welcomed any lover of beer and of the most varied musical genres.
One of the most special exercises was Mapeo [Mapping], in which we questioned our ways of traversing the city in relation to the art system. Several evenings we met to discuss this, we filled the floor of the house with maps of Lima, and toured with artist friends their version of the city. Subsequently, the Portfolio program was defined, ousting Mapeo. In this program we invited artists who were of our interest to talk about their work, without intermediaries or much infrastructure. We listened to the versions about their practice and witnessed unique moments, as they were consciously confronting their processes for the first time.
During the final stage of La Culpable we produced issues 0 and 1 of the magazine Juanacha. The different expectations surrounding the publication lengthened the process of the second issue and showed our difficulties when we insisted on maintaining a well-intentioned, but sometimes clumsy democracy. Priorities were changing and finally, the death of La Culpable was decided. The reasons were varied with members convinced and unconvinced, repentant and determined. However, it seemed the best within the crisis, as well as an opportunity to reinvent in something different.
The circumstances that existed when the space was born now do not exist anymore, and the artistic scene has changed a lot. However, nowadays we see how major problems require not to lower our guard in the face of those situations that challenged us while the space lasted: the homogeneity of what is being disseminated through media about art and culture, its superficiality, the reverence to the spectacular and its empty over production; the lack of memory and condemnation of facts that merit it, inaction against the privatization of public space, and the dispossession of tools to propose a critical transformation of the symbolic.
(Reduced version of a text written by Eliana Otta and published by the magazine Esterograma, Lima, 2009)
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