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Nightmares and Blighted Dreams in Little Boxes: Retablos of Nicario Jimenez Quispe
The other day in a post about art about the Shining Path years, I included an unidentified photograph of a Peruvian retablo created by, it turns out, master artisan Nicario Jiménez Quispe. Jiménez was born in Ayacucho, the historic center of indigenous struggle in Peru and the locus of Shining Path conflict, and now lives in the decidedly peaceful town of Naples, Florida. His work is notable for its application of the traditional Andean retablo form — essentially, a portable prayer box with handmade figurines depicting a narrative — to contemporary socio-political themes in Peruvian, U.S. and Mexican societies. Among the stories that Jimenez illustrates are the April 1997 rescue of hostages from the Japanese embassy…
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The Milk of Sorrow Joins Growing List of Works about Peru’s Shining Path Years
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…
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Goodbye to John Updike (1932 – 2009)
He was one of my favorite novelists, a person who wrote bracingly honest books about being male, being American, being human. Now El Fotografo walks into my office and tells me John Updike is dead. Of lung cancer. I had no idea he smoked. The obituaries are appearing now online, and I’ve snagged one below from Reuters. I feel sad. I thought he had at least another 10 years of writing in him. Updike became part of my life at around age 20, when I plunged into the Rabbit series for the first time. I was an Updike junkie from the word Go. It was his powers of observation that…
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Inca Princess Photo Project Celebrates Indigenous Beauty
tourism company in Cusco is sponsoring an intriguing photo project to highlight indigenous beauty and women's growing influence in South America. No prize money or payment is involved, but chosen photographers have their projects featured in a select Web-based gallery. The Inca Princess Photo Project invites professional photographers to submit ideas for "spectacular open-theme material celebrating the beauty and unique nature of South American women."
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Newest Superhero: A Soccer-playing Car Mechanic from Lima
I was so absorbed by the APEC brouhaha last month I missed the news that the world’s newest superhero hails from Lima. Santiago is a viewer-created superhero character who stars in four micro-episodes in Sprint’s online series Heroes: Destiny. More than one million people participated in the online series by selecting attributes for a male and a female character and voting for the winning hero. Scriptwriters fashioned a four-part story around the character and shot the series with live actors. Evidently, viewers were most intributed by the idea of a young working class guy from Lima possessing superpowers: Santiago is an ordinary young man living in Lima, Peru. Soccer is…
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Who’s Peruvian? Film “Soy Andina” documents two dancers’ search for identity
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…
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Moby Dick, Herman Melville & “Strange, Sad” Lima
“…like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in two” Rereading yesterday’s post on writers and Lima’s weather, I became curious about Herman Melville’s riff on Lima as “the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see.” When did Melville visit Lima? What prompted him to go into spasms of melancholy? A quick Google search revealed that the quote doesn’t belong to Melville, per se, but rather to Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick. The novel revolves around an embittered seaman, Captain Ahab, who is consumed with hunting down and killing the white albino whale who caused him to lose his leg. In Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishamel begins: What the white whale was…
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The Meaning of Polleras (vs. Women’s Hiking Pants)
The more I learn about the handmade clothing worn by traditional people in the Andes, the more impressed I become. The outfit above isn’t a museum piece, although it displays like one in the “Perú Hecho a Mano” boutique at Saga Falabella, in Lima’s Jockey Plaza mall. It is a very elaborate version of the typical dress worn to this day by Quechua women of the Andes. You see people dressed like this all throughout the Peruvian sierra when you venture away from the relatively big city of Cusco. Each piece of clothing is made by hand, often from handspun wool, and features intricate embroidery, beading or tassels. That green…
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Beautiful Ch’ullos
These colorful knit hats with earflaps, known as ch’ullos (CHEW-yohs), are worn by men in traditional Andean villages. You don’t usually find many high-quality ch’ullos in Lima, but this past Monday I found a virtual forest of them on the third floor of Saga Falabella department store, in Jockey Plaza, where the hats are being featured in a high-end artisanía exhibit, “Perú Hecho a Mano.” (Check out my story on the “Hecho a Mano” exhibit in this week’s Living in Peru.) You can find cheap mass-produced ch’ullos all over Cusco, but the most beautiful, and the most highly prized, are those that are woven by hand, in elaborate designs distinctive…
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Art, Film, Music & Dance, Climate Change & Disappearing Glaciers, Festivals, Sacred Rituals, Religion, Peru's Andes Mountains
Dancing for a Dying Glacier
Just back from the annual pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i, which takes place just below a 17,000-foot-high glacier (actually, three glacial tongues) in the southern Andes, about 80 miles south of Cusco. Since pre-Inca times, Qolqepunku Glacier has been revered as a sacred site associated with nearby Mount Ausangate, the tallest mountain in the region, considered by Andean people to be the area’s most powerful deity or “apu.” For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, local people have made the arduous journey to this remote, high-altitude glacier to pay homage with music, dance and offerings. In return, the apu grants health and fertility to the devotees, as well as to their families, their…
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Alberto Casari Retrospective, 1993 – 2008: Conceptual Art?
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…
