Archive for the 'Peru' Category

Peru or Bust: Please help fund our Kickstarter!

By c-monster on April 29, 2012 in Announcements, Art, C-Monster, Installation and Peru. 0 Comments


Schematic for La Luz, to be installed by Celso at the old Inca sun temple in Cusco, Peru.

Yes, I’m asking for money.

This summer, I’m going to be working as studio assistant/translator/chasqui for my partner-in-crime Celso on a series of installations that will go up at the Qorikancha  the old Inca sun temple in Cusco, Peru. For the project — which is titled La Luz — he’ll be building a series of architectural installations around the ruins grounds (and the attached Dominican monastery) using several hundred bottles of Inca Kola, the nuclear yellow Peruvian soda (see images above and below). It will be a pop paean to the gold that once covered the site. The piece will be pulled apart and re-installed in a new location every three days. At the end of each installation, the public will be allowed to take the Inca Kola home.

The museum that manages the site, the Museo Qorikancha y Convento de Santo Domingo, has commissioned the piece. But as with most arts institutions in Peru, the budgets are tiny. Which is why we’re asking for your help. This is going to be a beautiful project — unlike anything the museum has ever done. So pleasepleaseplease help us get to Peru! Any donation, no matter how small, makes a difference.

Please click through to Celso’s Kickstarter to send us your pennies. We have all kinds of goodies for rewards. And we promise that your donations will be wisely and prudently spent (on lots of Inca Kola). If you’re a regular reader, please think of this as a way to help me keep doing what I love to do — namely, writing about great-weird art I find wherever I happen to be.

Thanks so much! And thanks for reading C-Mon!!!

xox,
C.

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What I’m Reading.

By c-monster on April 16, 2012 in Books, C-Monster, Peru, Photography and What I'm Reading. 0 Comments


A family in in Zapallal, a squatter settlement on the outskirts of Lima. (Image courtesy of Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann.)

I’ve been marinating in photographer Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann’s latest book Zapallal | Yurinaki for several days — a chronicle of two Peruvian communities that are connected by circumstance and economics, even as they stand worlds apart. Separated by the Andes, Yurinaki sits at the edge of the central Amazon. Zapallal is located on the outskirts of Lima, tucked into the dusty-apocalyptic hills that make up the Peruvian coast.

The latter settlement came into existence in the 1980s, after a series of economic crises and the country’s simmering Internal Conflict led hundreds of thousands of rural Peruvians to migrate to the capital. Many of the residents of Zapallal hail from or are in some way linked to Yurinaki. But they are connected in other ways, too: by poverty, by social class, by their lack of political power.

In these communities, Marroquín Winkelmann finds a rare beauty. A young man sits cinematically in a mototaxi. A cat howls from a rickety wood platform while a pig watches pensively. A little boy plays in a toy car without wheels; he has nowhere to go. Marroquín uses lighting to dramatic effect — even in daylight settings — for images that take on an almost baroque quality in tone and content. (Note the daughter, above, in an almost blessing-like pose with the fly swatter.)

In Peru — a country where nearly one in ten people live in extreme poverty, and nearly one in three live under the poverty line — the lives of the poor can seem almost like an abstract concept. But Marroquín takes the statistics and makes them human, recording dignity where most folks wouldn’t think to look.

Zapallal | Yurinaki is available at Dalpine. Plus, see some of the images from the series on Marroquín’s website. (The puny images on my blog don’t do it justice.)

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Miscellany. 02.07.12.

By c-monster on February 7, 2012 in C-Monster, Miscellany, Peru, Photography and Travel. 0 Comments


Banana man, Lima. (Photo by El Celso.)

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Miscellany. 09.19.11.

By c-monster on September 19, 2011 in C-Monster, Graffiti, Miscellany, Peru and Street Art. 1 Comment


Miraflores graffiti, by Ultraclay! (Find more of his stuff here and here.)

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Photo Diary: Fernando Bryce at Alexander and Bonin in Chelsea.

By c-monster on June 15, 2011 in C-Monster, Drawing, Galleries, Illustration, New York and Peru. 7 Comments


A detail of a New York Times cover reproduced by Fernando Bryce, in his staggeringly detailed World War II-themed show at Alexander and Bonin. (All photos by C-M.)

This is one of those exhibits that made me exclaim “holy shit” the minute I walked in: for his piece El Mundo en Llamas (The World in Flames), Fernando Bryce has lined the walls of Alexander and Bonin’s ample space in Chelsea with faithful ink recreations of World War II-era newspaper front pages from England, France, the U.S., Germany and Peru. (All are depicted above the fold.) Screaming headlines related to war cover the walls, from floor to ceiling — a stirring chronicle of long-ago news reports on battle advances, defeats, carnage and victory. In between, Bryce has incorporated his renderings of era film posters that he culled from the pages of El Comercio, Peru’s leading daily. (Bryce was born in Peru; he produced El Mundo en Llamas in 2010-11.)

The result is a chronicle of the war that is intensely personal, providing the rare opportunity to view this much-studied global conflagration through a uniquely Latin American lens. Not only are there some interesting historical finds, such as an ad for a 1940s Disney film geared at and incorporating South Americans (see below), the film posters featured — for flicks such as La Sombra del Terror (The Shadow of Terror) and Los Crimenes del Doctor Satán (The Crimes of Doctor Satan) — seem to echo, in exaggerated, graphic form, everything happening in the news. In addition, Bryce’s illustrations are exquisite, turning scenes of war into works of ethereal beauty (such as the image of the Australian soldier, above, from the New York Times). Taken together, the exhibit provides a riveting take on the nature of war, news, propaganda and graphic art. Consider it a must-see.

The show is up through Saturday, at Alexander and Bonin.

Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: Fernando Bryce at Alexander and Bonin in Chelsea.’

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Peruvian Monuments, Redux: The photography of Pablo Hare.

By c-monster on May 27, 2011 in Art for stoners, C-Monster, Peru, Photography and Travel. 3 Comments

I am currently cultivating a healthy obsession with crazy works of public art in Peru. (See my earlier post here.) Which is why I was excited to hear about the work of Peruvian-born photographer Pablo Hare, who has a whole series devoted to some of the most sublime/absurd monuments you have ever laid your eyes on. From top to bottom: a statue of a puma, a tribute to the maca (a type of tuber) in Junín, and a contemporary rendering of the Lord of Sipán, a Moche figure found entombed on the North Coast of Peru (where my family hails from). Hare has captured some absolutely sublime public art ridiculosity. Be sure to click over to view the whole series.

Thanks to Andrés Marroquín Winklemann and Joerg Colberg for the tip.

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The banality of public monuments: Miguel Andrade Valdez on Lima.

By c-monster on April 4, 2011 in Armory-palooza, Art for stoners, C-Monster, Peru, Sculpture and Video. Closed


Untitled – Monumento Series, by Miguel Andrade Valdez.

Not wanting to ever be accused of producing timely coverage on this blog, I wanted to take a minute to ruminate on a video by Miguel Andrade Valdez I saw in Galería Revolver‘s booth at the Armory Show last month. It dovetails perfectly with my current Peru obsession, as well as my continuing interest in supremely absurd public works. In fact, recently, I’ve been immersed in photographer Mario Silva’s book Lords, Pyramids and Replicas: Images from the North Coast of Peru, in which he chronicles the influence of pre-Columbian art in contemporary architecture. If you’re into vernacular everything, his book is an absolutely stunning documentation of blended styles and motifs — from Moche forms to graceful Art Deco to that school of design a friend of mine lovingly refers to as “the South American bizarre.” Plus: it contains a two-page spread on bizarre traffic circle sculptures in northern Peru.

Which brings me right back around to the Armory: Andrade Valdez’s video Untitled – Monumento Series is a chaotic, rapid-fire visual compendium of the monuments that occupy Lima’s traffic circles and pedestrian malls. They range from the forgotten to the futurist, the Spanish Mediterranean to the brutal, the Modernist to the I-don’t-know-what. (Check out the weird blue things at about 2:50. They re-emerge later in the video as well.) Interestingly, in looking at all of this, the trapezoid emerges as a very popular shape — perhaps because it’s cheap and easy to construct (and resistant to earthquakes), perhaps because it’s a common motif in pre-Columbian Peruvian architecture. Also popular: brutalism. Of all of the monuments shown, my favorite have to be the bizarre pipe organ thingies, shown in the image above, which appear to be a decorative collaboration between various Soviet bloc architects and the guys in charge of the local water authority.

If you’re into all things design, consider watching Andrade’s video more than once. He has turned up some amazing stuff — a fantastic tribute to all of the things in our landscape we might see but rarely take the time to examine.

Find Miguel Andrade Valdez’s website here. Special thanks to Carlos Díaz at Ojjo for the tip on Mario Silva’s book.

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Photo Diary: ¡No Habla Español! at Pandemic — an all around good time.

By c-monster on March 13, 2011 in C-Monster, El Celso, Galleries, New York, Peru, Photo Diary, Prints and Street Art. Closed


Celso’s wall of chicha, with C-Monstruo shout-out. :-)


Internacional Privados: An original chicha poster from northern Peru.


A view of the mini chicha disco. Sensory overload in a mere 16 square feet.

Opening night for Celso’s ¡No Habla Español! at Pandemic was all kinds of fun. Thanks so much to everyone who came out. We danced, we drank, we danced some more — in a teeny weeny discoteca — into the night. The show is up through April 2nd, so you have plenty of time to shake some ass in the mini-disco. Plus, there’s always the closing party (April 2nd at 7pm). See you there!

An addendum: Public Radio International’s show Afropop has an excellent show on the history of cumbias. They have a whole section devoted to Peruvian chicha cumbias, describing their origins and their use of those super duper psychedelic surf guitars. If you want to get a sense of what these Peruvian chicha posters are all about, give this program a listen. Also, here’s a photo essay devoted to Elliot Túpac Urcuhuaranga, of the family behind Publicidad Viusa — makers of chicha posters.

Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: ¡No Habla Español! at Pandemic — an all around good time.’

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This Friday: ¡No Habla Español! at Pandemic in Williamsburg.

By c-monster on March 9, 2011 in Announcements, C-Monster, El Celso, Galleries, New York, Peru and Video. 2 Comments


Celso y C-Monstruo: Amores Perros. A Peruvian chicha poster — imported to Brooklyn. (Photo by C-M.)

One of my ongoing fascinations with Lima (which I’ve touched on in the past) is the soup of fog that covers the city about six months out of the year. It’s a phenomenon that seems to soak up all brightness and makes the desert ecosystem (already harsh) look even more apocalyptically inhospitable. It’s alluded to in countless works of Peruvian fiction (from novels by Mario Vargas Llosa to Daniel Alarcón), and is even discussed in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick — in the chapter on whiteness. (It is “the strangest, saddest city, thou cans’t see,” he wrote. “For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe.”)

Which brings to me to my ongoing interest in Peruvian chicha posters — the cheaply-printed band posters produced in an array of neon-colored inks. As Celso pointed out to me during our last trip around Peru, it’s almost as if they produce their own light. Perhaps a requirement in a place where sharp edges are often dulled by the perpetual mist.

This Friday, Celso is going to be showing a collection of these — along with collages and a mini chicha/cumbia disco installation that accommodates two people for dancing (I helped with the soundtrack!!) — at Pandemic Gallery in Williamsburg. But we wanted folks to see what the posters look like installed around the foggy Peruvian capital, so we made a short video about it (see below). It includes a bit of footage from our trip to meet Fortunato Urcuhuaranga at Publicidad Viusa, the family-run studio that originated this look in the ’80s. (It is now widely copied all over the country.) And features some spectacular audio of me mumbling. If you want to learn more, Creative Review also has a great video on these wonderful folks.

Anyhow, please come to the opening this Friday to check out the show! It should be a ton of fun.

El Celso
¡No Habla Español!
Pandemic Gallery
37 Broadway (btw. Kent & Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Friday, March 11, 2011
7-11pm

For more info, click here.

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Photo Diary: Andean mummies and Peruvian prisons.

By c-monster on January 5, 2011 in C-Monster, Peru, Photo Diary and Sculpture. 1 Comment


Sculpture of an Andean mummy — a work of prisoner art. (Photos by C-M.)

While running around the northern highland city of Chachapoyas, we picked up a small sculpture of a skeleton posed as pre-Columbian mummy. (Many Andean cultures placed the dead in a fetal position prior to burial.) Along with numerous other crafts, the local souvenir stands feature boundless numbers of these mummy carvings in an array of sizes. Many of them are quite crude, but in a small shop near the market, we found one that was quite beautifully done, with a fine attention to detail and proportion. It’s every last vertebrae had been skillfully rendered and there was something poignant about its expression.

I asked the lady who managed the souvenir shop if she knew the name of the artisan who crafted it. She did not. These sculptures, it turns out, are crafted at a nearby maximum security prison, otherwise known as El Penal de Huancas. Apparently, the place is loaded with all manner of unsavory murders, rapists and narcos. A couple of days after we bought the piece, we happened to pay a visit to Huancas and went to see the prison. (From the exterior, since it wasn’t a visitation day.) And I tried to imagine the hands from which my little sculpture emerged.

Pix of the prison after the jump.

Continue reading ‘Photo Diary: Andean mummies and Peruvian prisons.’

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