‘Why a Biennial in Lima?’ was the opening question that the art critic and President of the Lima Biennial, Luis Lama, raised in 1997 in the first Ibero-American Lima Biennial catalogue:
It happens that after almost three decades of isolation – imposed by the economy and ideology that marked the times – it is necessary for Lima to once again become part of the international circuit to which it had always belonged. We should add that with the recovery of the historical centre of our city, Lima is gradually becoming again a place of great cultural attraction once again, because among us, as in other few Latin American capitals, a phenomenon of cultural integration is taking place: an encounter not just between the capital and the provinces but also between the country and the world.
(Lama, 1997: 8)
Lama saw the Biennial as a mechanism for the relocation of Lima and its art scene on the international circuit which, he stated, had been articulated three decades earlier. His mention of Lima’s previous connection to the international art circuit referred to internationalisation projects stimulated by local elites during the 1950s and 1960s.1 His reference to the ‘decades of isolation’ included Juan Velasco Alvarado and Francisco Morales Bermudez’s 12 years of leftist military government and agrarian reforms from 1968 to 1979 to Alan García’s first period of office from 1996 to 1990, with his refusal to pay the National Debt and Peru’s consequent withdrawal from the world economic system, leading to hyperinflation. This was a period marked by terrorist action and the internal civil war from 1980. By the first Lima Biennial, the main leader of the Shining Path terrorist group had already been captured, and the turn towards the neoliberal economic project was leading to macro-economic growth. Alberto Fujimori had been in power since 1990. After winning the general elections against the renowned writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Fujimori adopted a set of drastic structural changes that led the country to a neoliberal era. The international monetary system approved his actions and turned a blind eye to his subsequent political manoeuvre: a self coup d’état.2 An anaesthetised political reaction went hand-in-hand with the failure and discrediting of political parties, allowing a rapid move towards pragmatic governance. Undermining politics with emphatic neoliberal action became a way of making politics both in Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorial regime (1992–2000) at the national level and in Lima mayor Alberto Andrade’s urban government (1996–2002).
Andrade, previously mayor of the Miraflores district, was elected Mayor of Lima in 1996 and re-elected in 1998. His municipal plan had as its pivotal programme the ‘recovery’ of the historic centre of Lima as the heart of the city, and included the restoration of its colonial heritage and its re-establishment as a hub for political and financial decision-making and international tourism. He began an aggressive and immensely popular programme of restoring, cleaning and reordering Lima’s centre, led by privatisation and white-washing polices firing 1,238 municipal workers, privatising much of the municipal work and removing approximately 20,000 street vendors; plazas and façades were refurbished, colonial balconies restored, and Lima’s ‘traditional’ inhabitants were called to return and use the centre for residency, leisure and investment.3 The recovery plan was accompanied by the slogan Volver al Centro (Return to the Centre). To show their faith in the project, Andrade and his family moved from their house in Miraflores district to the Casona Gildemeister, a large mid-19th-century house in the city centre. While street vendors had been using the Lima Centre’s public space as a big market place since the early 1980s and many people were already inhabiting and making sense of Lima’s historical centre through different activities, they were not the mayor’s target: he sought to attract elites, traditional Limeños and international tourists.
Return to the Centre sought to reverse the elite’s gradual abandonment of the centre since 1920, when they had moved away from their casonas (large historical houses) to the sunnier coastal districts of the south, motivated by the construction of new roads connecting Lima to the suburbs (Ludeña 2004). Strong internal migration, triggered by the dispossession of peasants’ agricultural land in the highlands and the 1940 earthquake, reinforced the elites’ exodus, and the newcomers found places to live in the already crumbling and divided casonas.4 Immigrants also decided to took over Lima’s surrounding hills and fought to own a piece of land, build more spacious houses and obtain water, electricity and other services. In 1980 a second exodus from the Andes and the Amazon, motivated by the rise of terrorism, compounded Lima’s transformation. Its streets became marketplaces for street vendors whose stalls transformed the organisation and visuality of the space.
During the 1980s numerous social scientists studied this internal migration and transformation of Lima (e.g. Altamirano 1984; Matos Mar 1984; De Soto et al. 1986; Golte 1987; Degregori et al. 1987; Adams 1991), looking at its processes, organisation, decision-making, modes of living and the new urban culture categorised as ‘popular culture’. Many social scientists saw this process with optimism suggesting that it was producing a transition from invaders to citizens (Degregori et al. 1987) from a traditional to a modern society (Quijano 1980): an optimistic narrative that has remained a constant in social sciences as well as in the arts. This transformation of the city also captured the attention of architects and artists such as of the collective E.P.S. Huayco (1980–1982),5 that approached ‘popular culture’ by recognising and appropriating its visuality in art projects displayed both in the public space and in the official art circuit. The influential art critic Mirko Lauer’ comment, ‘In today’s Peru only the popular is modern’, written for a Huayco exhibition in 1980, clearly highlighted the impact of the so called ‘popular culture’ in the arts, as Mijail Mitrovic explains (2016: 59), and the enthusiasm for what the ‘popular’ was producing. The 1980s witnessed the emergence of art collectives whose works approached the new urban aesthetics and the organisation of the migrant population, as well as the disturbing period of violence and the exploration of gender issues. It also saw, however, a decline in the state’s role in culture previously promoted by the military government with a wider notion of art in terms of cultural narratives, diverse art agents and public platforms, which gradually shrank into an art world based on private galleries.6 A Huayco artist told me that under the new democracy they could not find sustainable channels through which to connect their work with a larger population and at the same time stay in the art world. Although these art collectives were short-lived, most lasting only two or three years, they showed to new generations of artists a different way of making art, of being an artist, and of relating to social aspects.7
Yet, while the public art events promoted by the military government came to an end, it is important to note that in the 1980s and at the urban level, the socialist municipal government of Mayor Alonso Barrantes from 1984 to 1986 also promoted an expanded version of culture with his Cultural Participation Plan, which stated: ‘We all produce culture. This should not be the privilege of artists, poets and specialists. Culture should be driven by broader sectors of the population’ (Herbert Rodríguez’s archive). One materialisation of this policy was Carpa Teatro (the Theatre Tent), a platform for cultural events under the Santa Rosa Bridge, which links the predominantly low-income district of Rimac with the centre of Lima and in which, for instance, Los Bestiarios participated.8 Alfredo Márquez, at the time a student of architecture and an active Bestiario, and now a renowned Peruvian artist, described me what was for him the Lima of 1985, when it was ruled by the leftist party Izquierda Unida and the young Alan García had just become president:
There was a pulse in the city that was about having the whole of Lima’s centre full of street vendors. Try to imagine: the centre of Lima was all street vendors, a festival of popular creativity, amazing! Where others saw poverty, unemployment, chaos, disorder, we saw a living city. There were the subtes [underground musicians] selling their tapes. Poets were selling their poems. Informalist painters were selling their stuff on the street. It was as if everyone was on the street. The street was alive. The cultural centre, by definition, was the Museo de Arte de Lima, not for its exhibitions but for its film centre [filmoteca]. Everyone went to watch films at the film centre! Everybody, whether a subte living in Carabayllo or a pretty girl from San Isidro. The place where we all were was the Lima Film Centre. There were those who lived from that point towards the centre, and others who arrived there and then returned.
That city is gone. (Interview, January 2014)
The Lima Centre recovery policy aimed to transform Lima from a ‘chaotic’ to an ‘ordered’ city, with notions of order and beauty dictated by Andrade’s social taste. In her vivid ethnography of Alberto Andrade’s urban project, Daniella Gandolfo (2009: 81) states that his victory was to naturalise his aesthetic project. Yet Andrade’s urban policy was not an isolated but rather a global trend promoted by transnational organisations such as UNESCO’s World Heritage Site programme. A private organisation, the Patronato de Lima (the Patronage of Lima), and the Peruvian government started the procedure for Lima’s recognition as a World Heritage Site, which was granted in 1991. However, from 1991 to 1995 neither the central government nor the local authority worked to what John Collins (2008) calls ‘UNESCO templates’. It was Alberto Andrade who took on this challenge; specifically, his urban plan was based on the 1996 Second Habitat Conference in Istanbul, which insisted that metropolitan restructuring must happen through the recovery of the urban centre. The engagement of Andrade’s policy with UNESCO’s views had rapid consequences, as noted in Caretas magazine:
During the recent stay in Lima, the general director of UNESCO, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, offered UNESCO’s full support to the municipality and announced that the IDB [Inter-American Development Bank] will also assist in the recovery of the centre with a sum of between 5 to 12 million dollars.
Calling for a truce in their ‘battle for’ customers, the Lima, Santander, Latino, Commerce and Credit Wiese banks, all of which own buildings in the financial centre of Lima, have joined this cause.
(Caretas, 25 April 1996)
Andrade’s aesthetic project for Lima as a simultaneously colonial, criollo and modern city was well-received by UNESCO, by businessmen and traditional Limeños, and widely promoted by the media. Their aesthetic views of Lima coincided. Thus, these actors actively participated in the process of naturalising Andrade’s project as the template to follow. Andrade’s success was considerable and confronted Alberto Fujimori’s as the leading figure. Yet Andrade neither opposed nor supported Fujimori’s regime: the two coexisted, engraining Lima and Peru into the neoliberal project – more precisely, into a first wave of neoliberalisation; taking Peck et al. (2009; 2010)’s suggestion of rather to understand neoliberalism as a static notion and totality, to approach to the phenomenon as a dynamic conception (neoliberalisation), this is as the succession of an uneven path-dependent neoliberal restructuring.
Scholars have widely explained how neoliberalism is not just a set of economic policies that seeks to reduce state power and its participation in the market by promoting deregulation, privatisation and the reduction of state-subsidised social services. It is not just an economic doctrine, but a ‘technology of governing’ (Ong 2006), a ‘state-led project of social engineering’ (Taylor 2006) that modifies the relationship between the governing and the governed and strengthens institutions that advance market power while reducing the power of those who seek to limit it, in particular collective institutions (Bourdieu 1988). The intersection of Peru and Lima’s governmental strategies at different levels, would gradually raise neoliberalism not only as a set of policies but as a mode of subjectivity and common sense (Foucault 2008; Harvey 2006), as I will further explain in Chapters 2 and 6.
