Gustavo Buntinx

THE SOULFUL STRUGGLE

(Curatorial synopsis)

Patricia Bueno / Susana Torres
Identikit
2007
Video / 07:51′
MICROMUSEO
(“al fondo hay sitio”)

“If you remove the exterior,
the interior remains.
If you remove the interior, remains the soul.”

(Handwritten phrase on a chalkboard
in the opening scene of the video Identikit,
by Patricia Bueno and Susana Torres.
Text adapted from the film Vivre sa vie,
by Jean Luc Godard).

After two decades scarred by uncivil war (1980 – 1992) and neodictatorship (1992 – 2000), Peru stepped into the democratic promises of a new century with an expectant search for the Eros required to vanquish the always persistent Thatanos in our impacted society.

A lust for Life that also manifests itself through spiritual quests. Even religious ones, in the etymological sense of religare: to reconnect, to recompose a fragmented community.

The very partial selection of videos offered here captures just some of the cultural evidences of this different fight. This struggle for the soul, this soulful struggle, this lucha ALMAda: an untranslatable Spanish play on words, a dramatic pun conceived in resistance to the ideologies of death, the Death Cults so prevalent in the various calls for a never ending lucha aRmada, an armed struggle whose legacy of terror still seeks to poison our society, and art in general, and even the human condition.

But art —certain art— responds to such sinister hauntings reclaiming its own spaces of contemplation. And of spiritual —existential— hope.

That distinct erotic vocation, however, that reborn libido, is instinctive rather than programmatic. It does not declare itself: it seeps in, at times unconsciously, through various expressions. And the compendium assembled for this project makes that diversity wholly evident. From the mythical-sexual drives of the Amazon (Christian Bendayán) to the more reflexive and ritual attitudes (Ana Rosa Benavides; Íntegro; José Medina). Passing through the sacralization of wounded nature (Melissa Herrera – Carlos Morelli; Carmen Reátegui). Or the personal internalization of war (Patricia Bueno – Susana Torres; Giancarlo Scaglia). And the traumatic sublimation of internal exile (Chiara Macchiavello; Moico Yaker – Delia Ackerman – Rhony Alhalel). Even the melancholic contemplation of ruin (Carlos Runcie Tanaka; Maya Watanabe). As well as its complementary opposite: the apocalyptic delirium (Jaime Miranda Bambarén – Erasmo Wong Seoane).

The joint review of such scattered but rearticulated tensions (religare) incites us to recover an all-encompassing vision. That of metaphysics. At times, even that of theology. Maybe a mist, perhaps a mysticism.

Ojalá (may God wish it so).

In a country where everything external was taken from us, and attempts were even made to strip away our very interiority, the yearning thirst for a surviving spirituality emerges from the entrails of our unsettled selves.

A pulsion, a calling: “Recuerde el alma dormida”, that classic verse composed by Jorge Manrique in the late 15th century, and yet so more relevant in our liminal, perhaps terminal, times. In Old Spanish, be it recalled, recordar means not just to recollect, but also to revive. To arouse, to wake up, to awaken.

That confluence of meanings is of incisive relevance to our Peruvian trances of prolonged mourning.

Arouse the sleeping soul, revive the dormant spirit, remember…

The SOULful struggle.

Carlos Morelli / Melissa Herrera
Rimaq Mayu / Río Hablador
Escultura cinética
(Rimaq Mayu / The Talking River
Kinetic Sculpture)
2008
Video / 04:29′
Colección MICROMUSEO
(“al fondo hay sitio”)

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