“Small Is Viable”: The Arts, Ecology, and Development in Peru

Abstract

This essay examines three Lima-based cultural projects dating from the 1980s through the 2000s that creatively adapt ideas and iconography associated with large-scale 1960s-era modernization initiatives to forge an alliance between “nature” and “culture” against capitalist development. Lima en un árbol (1981), an action and video by Rossana Agois, Wiley Ludeña, Hugo Salazar del Alcázar, and Armando Williams, and the installation and video Árbol (2002–2008) by Carmen Reátegui present trees as individuated, bearers of collective memory, and subjects of ritual interaction, while also contesting extractivist economies. The Micromuseo, founded in 1983 by Gustavo Buntinx and Susana Torres Márquez, conceptualized cultural networks as an ecosystem to articulate an “alternative museality” in the capital during eventful decades marked by devastating civil conflict and the implementation of austere neoliberalism. Inviting direct interaction with diverse publics, each of these ecologically oriented projects anticipates “cultural sustainability” as an emerging concept in cultural policy arenas. By drawing attention to how these cultural producers deliberately embrace the small and the everyday in opposition to elite institutional presentation, I want to bring greater recognition to cultural placemaking as a source of knowledge and a conduit for often marginalized perspectives to enter ongoing public conversations about human-environmental interactions.