Herbert Rodríguez | Peace is a corrosive promise
A selection of 30 artworks and a projection of D.I.Y. slides by artist and activist Herbert Rodri?guez (Lima, 1959), will be on show this year at the Pavilion of Peru, in the 59th Biennale di Venezia, The milk of dreams. Selected by curators Jorge Villacorta (Lima, 1958) and Viola Varotto (Mila?n, 1982), the exhibit as a whole has been titled Peace is a corrosive promise. Armando Andrade de Lucio is reprising his role as commissioner of the Peruvian Pavillion for the fourth time in the Art Biennale.
Herbert Rodri?guez is well known as a visual artist of radical and critical stance in contemporary Peruvian art. The works on show date from the 1985-1990 period and comprise remnants of his agit-prop production (a mix of photomontage, collage, stencil, silkscreen and painting), for the subterra?neos (underground scene of anarchist/punk ethos). This scene rejected every aspect of Peruvian life at the time, but recognizing the structural violence present did not assume any political role.
Also, the pavilion will show remains of his ARTE-VIDA mural newspapers from 1989 (these as well as the agit-prop material are preserved in the artist's archive, together with the documentation displayed on tables in the exhibit). The ARTE-VIDA pieces derived from his agit-prop practice and were produced in a political and cultural war theater: the symbolically charged territory of the university campus of Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. The campus was a stronghold of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a subversive group that in 1980 had declared war on the Peruvian state and through terrorist actions and clashes with the Armed Forces had initiated a period of murderous violence in the country. Rodriguez countered the painted murals and gestures of Shining Path adepts on campus with his own collage-based mural pieces and, in the process, he put his life at risk.
Herbert Rodríguez' peace is corrosive as any authentic countercultural value should be; only thus will it be the foundation for democracy in the spirit of true liberation. We are still in the process, even now.