Last week I dropped in on a very cool Finnish design exhibit being hosted at Lima’s ICPNA center. “Northern Stars” showcases more than 100 years of innovative design from Finnish designers and design firms such as Marimekko, Arabia, Nokia and Metso.

El Híjo and I were hoping to catch sight of some Moomintrolls, the eccentric woodland characters invented by Finnish children’s author Tove Jansson, but as it happened there weren’t any velvet-snouted trolls lolling about the art gallery.  There were, however, some playful tree-shaped room dividers, rather like props from a children’s fantasy, that caught my eye.

“The Tree,” as it’s called, is a piece of functional art created by the Finnish designer Eero Aarnio  (creator of the iconic ball chair) for the Martelas collection. It can be used as a room divider or a coat hanger or as an object on which to display things. The especially nice thing about The Tree is that profits from its sales will go to plant fruit trees in the Peruvian Andes — four real trees for every one designer Tree sold.  

A nonprofit called World Vision Finland is behind the Tree charity effort, as its Facebook page explains:

The Tree is a space divider designed by Professor Eero Aarnio for Martelas collection. Part of the income from each tree will be donated to a World Vision Finland regional development project in the Peruvian Andes that will plant fruit trees to halt and prevent erosion. The fruit from the trees will be an additional source of food, which will benefit local children in particular.

Each Tree sold will produce four fruit trees in Peru. The fruit trees will benefit 300 families and 800 children regionally. Planning for the two-year project has already started. The project will prevent erosion and have a long-reaching impact.

“We want to contribute to reliable, high-standard charities. It felt very natural to us to help with this product because the aim is to prevent erosion in a developing country. Professor Eero Aarnio says he always felt the Tree was the tree of paradise, and thus it too will produce fruit for those who truly in need.

The Tree was launched during last year’s Milan Furniture Fair (April 2008). For more information, visit World Vision online:  http://www.wvi.org/

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A scene from the Spanish-Peruvian movie “The Milk Of Sorrow” by director Claudia Llosa in this photo released by the Berlinale film festival. (Berlinale via Associated Press)

Congratulations to Peruvian-born director Claudia Llosa, whose drama The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada) captured the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin film festival last week.

I am eager to see the film, which to my knowledge is not presently showing in Lima. If you’re curious about it, here’s a recent review from Variety:

With her sophomore effort “The Milk of Sorrow,” Peruvian director Claudia Llosa (“Madeinusa”) bolsters her reputation as one of the most interesting femme helmers working in the Americas today.

Through the story of a withdrawn contemporary maidservant in Lima, the film deals subliminally but forcefully with the wartime traumas of many Peruvian women (who are said to have passed their traumas on to their daughters through breastfeeding, hence the title). Ultra-arthouse item, which copped the Golden Bear at Berlin, should find many champions as well as a few naysayers, and will need passionate support wherever it goes. It bowed in Spain Feb. 13.

At first, the pic seems a slow-moving, particularly well-framed ethnographic study of life in the big city in Peru; it only gradually becomes clear that Llosa’s second feature perfectly aligns form and content. The film never shows the crimes committed against women before the 1990 regime change, though the violence, rape and torture they suffered inform every frame. By keeping them offscreen, Llosa underlines the fact they are unspeakable crimes, not even talked about today — though their aftermath is still felt even after the women directly concerned have passed away.

Beautiful but aloof local girl Fausta (Magaly Solier, also the protag of “Madeinusa”) finds herself at the deathbed of her mother (Barbara Lazon). Fausta suffers from what the locals call “the frightened breast” (pic’s literal Spanish title), having inherited her mother’s wartime distress through nursing.

Paralyzed with fear, the girl has inserted a potato in her intimate parts to protect herself from the same fate as her mother. As in “Madeinusa,” Peruvian realities and Llosa’s light magical realism mesh to create a vivid picture of a society and its problems. Things that might seem strange in any other context feel perfectly normal here.

The only allusions to the past of Fausta’s mother are heard in the gruesome song she sings just before her death. But music will also provide Fausta with a means of escape and reconciliation, as she finds a job as a maid for an occasionally tempestuous pianist, Aida (Susi Sanchez), who takes a liking to Fausta’s own improvised songs.

Though Fausta and her kind uncle (Marino Ballon) come from a poor background and practically live in a slum, the film finds beauty and even humor in their world. Llosa insists on marriage and natural death as normal parts of the cycle of life — and as a contrast to the chaos that preceded the period in which the pic is set.

Solier’s largely passive performance makes sense in context, though it will turn some people against an already sober film. Technically, “The Milk of Sorrow” is a treat, starting with Natasha Braier’s composed lensing and Frank Gutierrez’s languid but precise editing rhythm. Warm-blooded guitar score is a nice touch, but unaccompanied songs sung by the protags are the true key to the drama.

Llosa’s film follows on the heels of a growing trend in art and literature to explore the brutal events of the Shining Path era of the 1980s and ’90s. Nearly 70,000 Peruvians died or disappeared between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the armed conflict between Maoist Shining Path guerillas and Peru’s military. 

Some notable books in English and artworks that address the Shining Path conflict and its legacy include:

• Peruvin-born Fiction writer Daniel Alarcon’s wonderful short story collection War by Candlelight (2005);
• Dutch-born sculptor Lika Mutal’s stone memorial El Ojo Que Llora (The Eye that Cries), which honors the 70,000 victims of the internal war. (The Lima-based work was vandalized by Fujimori supporters in 2007);

The Eye that Cries, by Lika Mutal / photo by Santiago Stucchi

• Nicholas Shakespeare’s 2002 novel The Dancer Upstairs, which is based on the events that led to the capture of Abimael Guzman, the leader of the Shining Path movement;
•  Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto, based on the 1996 Tupac Amaru takeover of the Japanese ambassadorial residence in Lima;
• Chilean artist Iván Navarro’s ‘Holeway’ series 9007) includes an optical-illusion sculpture titled “Sendero Luminoso”; one critic notes that in this word “escape is suggested, but not possible; there is a menacing tone to [Navarro's] funhouse allusion”;
• Artists working in traditional crafts media have begun to depict events from the Shining Path conflict in three-dimensional retablos.

Retablo by Nicario Jimenez depicting indigenous people caught in violent conflict between Shining Path and state forces

I’m sure that there are many more intriguing works of art, film and literature that explore the Shining Path years. Can readers recommend any others?

Further Reading:

“Sendero Luminoso and the Trauma of Peru,” from gci275, for a history of SL through 2003

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Who is Peruvian? Who is Andean?

Can a Peruvian dancer who’s made a new life in New York City return after 15 years to her remote hometown in the Andes to reclaim her heritage?

Can a young American of mixed Peruvian and Puerto Rican heritage find her “inner Andina” (as I like to call it) by studying folkloric dance techniques in towns throughout Peru?

These questions and more are raised in Soy Andina (“I Am Andean”), a full-length documentary film in English and Spanish by American director Mitch Teplitsky. 

The movie follows two the journeys of two dancers, Nelida, from the Peruvian highlands, and Cynthia, from Queens, New York, as they live out their dreams of (re)connecting with their Andeans roots.

The film’s approach to these questions is never polemic, prefering instead to let viewers make up their own minds as to the “authenticity” of each dancer’s proclaimed or evolving identity. 

This open-endedness makes SOY ANDINA a pleasure to watch. It also doesn’t hurt that Nelida and Cynthia are strong dancers and each is charismatic in her own way: Nelida with a calm sense of purpose (to host her town’s annual fiesta) and Cynthia with an exubertant desire to immerse herself in new experiences and to test her abilities.

SOY ANDINA is currently being screened in venues in both Peru and the United States. Chances are that if you live in a large city in either country, you’ll have a chance to see the film. I highly recommend it.

Here are some upcoming screenings:

Thu, Oct 23, 7pm | HUARAZ, PERU
Co-presented by InkaFest and HotelAndino

Wed, Nov 5, 6:30pm | LIMA, PERU
South American Explorers Club, Miraflores

Thurs, Nov 20, 10 am | SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Visual Anthropology conference/film festival

To learn more about SOY ANDINA, to view clips and to read viewers’ testimonies, click here or visit http://www.soyandina.com.

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Peruvian artist Alberto Casari’s 15-year retrospective (“Alberto Casari & PPPP, 1993 -2008″) , showing at the downstairs ICPNA gallery through May 18 (see gallery listing below), teases the limits of what’s considered Art in conservative Lima. The wide-ranging exhibit showcases, among other objects, a chair impossible to sit on, blank canvases “painted” with ocean water, a pair of rubber diving fins decorated with eyes, and a boiling pot set on a stovetop, which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a pan of condensed ice kept solid through refrigeration.

Even more titillating is a photo triptych of a gaudy birthday cake decorated with the text, “La Madre de los Conchasumadres Está Siempre Encinta” (The mother of the motherf*cker is always pregnant). Standing at the ready under each identical image is a bright-red fire extinguisher, a joking reference to the cake’s incendiary message. Clearly, a sort of light-handed, provocative sensibility is at work here, but is Casari’s work “conceptual,” as the exhibit’s literature claims?

Compared with that of mainstream conceptualist artists in the United States, I don’t think so.

Casari is too interested in texture, materials, in the thingness of things, to qualify as a true conceptualist. He may flirt with ideas or, in some cases, with process (the ocean-water paintings, for instance), but in the end, Casari is fascinated with producing objects – not ideas – that act viscerally on the viewer. That approach, or obsession, if you like, stands in sharp contrast to the central premise of conceptual art – that of the primacy of concept. Although people disagree on which sorts of works can be encompassed by “conceptual art,” most standard definitions of the term include the gist of the Collins English dictionary (quoted on the Tate Museum’s own page on conceptualism):

 Back in 1980 or 1981 I viewed a conceptual art installation in Connecticut that illustrated this definition to a T. The featured artist, then head of the University of Hartford art school, was a hard-core proponent of American-style conceptual art — the more conceptual and disembodied, the better. The installation consisted of a recording of dogs barking over and over. The artist/professor hadn’t recorded the dogs himself; he had simply “had” the idea and arranged for someone else (a groveling grad student?) to execute it. That was it. If you were bothered by his not having made the recording, well, then, you obviously didn’t understand Conceptual Art. I remember listening to the tedious doggie soundtrack and feeling bored, as well as irritated, at the artist for wasting my time, which may have been his point. The work’s physical representation wasn’t supposed to matter.

In contrast, when I walk through the Casari retrospective, I want to touch some of the artworks, a response I can’t imagine having toward most conceptual art.

Many of Casari’s pieces are about intriguing surfaces: burned wood, viscous oil, thick rubber, animal fur, paint. Physical identity is everything with these works: the viewer is taunted to touch them as objects, not ideas, and if one ultimately does remain at arm’s length from them, it is because of gallery protocol: Look, don’t touch. That teasing quality haunts the exhibit: Casari plays with viewers’ responses to his art but doesn’t back down on his allegiance to form and materials. Casari, or one of his alter egos, made these things. The finished works do, in the end, matter.

Show details:

“Alberto Casari & PPPP“
through
May 18, 2008

Galería Germán Krüger Espantoso , ICPNA,

Avenida Angamos Oeste 160, Miraflores

Lima, Peru

Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 11 a.m. – 8 p.m.

Free admission

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