We are interested in a poetic aesthetic … that is both visually engaging and affectively uncomfortable.
Introduction
Colectivo MR is a creative partnership between the Peruvian artist Marina García Burgos and the Spanish art historian Ricardo Ramón Jarne. Together they create imagery that draws on the language and lineage of fine art to raise challenging issues around injustice and violence. While many of the concerns they address are common to much of the rest of the world, the context in which they create and present their work is more specifically Peruvian. Conscious that many of those who engage with fine art have an entrenched resistance to acknowledging certain types of injustice, they construct their critique within an aesthetic mise-en-scène that seeks to engage the eye of the viewer, and thence their mind and imagination, without triggering the mental censorship of denial.
Their approach is smart because aesthetics are about much more than simply beautiful images. The concept describes a complex interplay between beauty and taste. This is important, because taste is a highly reflexive notion that suggests an educated sensibility, even connoisseurship. It requires a knowledge of both formal and historical canons of artistic value. It is a lens and mirror: allowing the viewer to evaluate an image while reflecting back to them a sense of their own refinement and expertise. At a neurophysiological level, this releases chemicals into the brain that generate a sense of pleasurable reward that, in turn, reinforces and further focuses attention.
It is within this beguiling aesthetic that the artists enfold the challenging conceptual heart of each work. In a country where art museums and galleries are more often frequented by the privileged than by those who for reasons of poverty or race remain unwelcome, this strategy is adroitly targeted. It permits the possibility of a visual dialogue and personal reflection on subjects the viewer might otherwise ignore or simply reject as unworthy of consideration – too unsettling to the comfortable certainties of privilege to be entertained. In this way, Colectivo MR harness a reflexive concern with artistic taste as the means by which to circumvent defensive denial and make evident issues of inequity and injustice that are, themselves, deeply concerning.
Alasdair Foster
Interview
When and why did you start working together?
COLECTIVO MR: We were living in Peru at the same time, although Ricardo is a cultural diplomat and travels a lot. As friends, we shared concerns about the levels of injustice and violence in our country and yet no one in the Peruvian art world was addressing these urgent social problems. We believe that art should denounce injustice and violence but do so through aesthetic concepts. We like to consider our work as a challenging critique presented in an artistically appealing way.
Do you each have specific roles in the creative process?
R: The roles combine differently with each series, but in general the concept, the formal design, and the underlying theoretical proposal are developed collaboratively. That said, it is Marina that operates the camera.
M: The ideas arise from mutual experiences or from news that has an impact on us; it can be current or an historical event. There is a lot of discussion, looking for the narrative that will underpin the images. This kind of brainstorming is something we both enjoy.
© Colectivo MR – from the series ‘Only Love’ 2006
I’d like to begin by talking about the series ‘Only Love’.
R: Peru has experienced high levels of violence against women and continues to do so. Between 2010 and 2017, 837 women were murdered and a further 1,172 women had attempts made on their lives. Updated numbers showed an increase in femicides between 2015 and 2021, with 897 women being killed in Peru during that period. Indeed, the number of women murdered increases every year. It is a serious problem yet one with little visibility in Peru, which is why we began this series.
M: We were lucky enough to have personalities from the world of arts, sports, and politics among those who appear in the photographs. By photographing celebrities – women who were famous, powerful – we were making it clear that anyone can be a victim of domestic violence. When it came to choosing the type of wounds represented in the photographs, we referred to a list of the injuries most commonly suffered by women who had been abused. These were then recreated by two highly skilled make-up artists. The resulting exhibition was an incredible success achieving significant coverage in the media.
[Left] © Colectivo MR ‘Bar II, Miraflores, Lima’ from the series ‘If there is no other world…’ 2007
[Right] © Colectivo MR ‘Box, Miraflores, Lima’ from the series ‘If there is no other world…’ 2007
Your series ‘If there is no other world…’ has also received a lot of coverage. How did it begin?
MR: Racism is a worldwide problem, but in countries with Indigenous populations it is especially unjust because these racists are people who came and settled on lands which were originally owned by the Indigenous people. The absurd thing is that racists stole Indigenous lands and yet it is they who hate Indigenous people.
In this series, the Indigenous family occupies various spaces where, in reality, they would not be welcome, and in some cases would be denied entry. Presenting this family in those places generated a great deal of controversy.
Who are the family in the pictures?
MR: The family come from the mountains of Peru. They have personally suffered racism and were very aware of the intention and importance of these images. We made a contract with them for their participation in these photographs and, at the same time, they became great activists for the social concept of this work. It was a perfect creation together.
[Left] © Colectivo MR ‘Jorge Chavez International Airport, Callao’ from the series ‘If there is no other world…’ 2007
[Right] © Colectivo MR ‘Gym, Miraflores, Lima’ from the series ‘If there is no other world…’ 2007
How has this critique of contemporary urban Peru been received – in Peru, overseas?
MR: In Peru, this series of photographs was very controversial. We received a lot of nasty criticism and lost friends. There were attempts to boycott the exhibition and people used pseudonyms to write very destructive reviews. Without a doubt, the saddest thing was discovering that in our immediate environment we had racist friends. It was a huge shock for us.
On the other hand, when the series was shown in London at the 2008 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and later at PhotoEspaña 2011, many people applauded this denunciation racism and enthusiastically supported the critical nature of this work. Either way, what was important to us was to bring this issue out from under its veil of tacit discomfort and get it into the headlines.
How did the concept for ‘Poussin in Peru’ come about? What do you see as the underlying relationships between the Baroque landscapes of the seventeen-century French painter and the Peruvian socio-political context of your photographs?
MR: We had been to see an exhibition about Poussin at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Afterwards, we realised that these wonderful paintings left us with a deep feeling of bewilderment, but we did not know where it came from. Then, looking at these paintings in more detail, we realised that in many of them there were scenes of violence and murder camouflaged among nature and that this was what generated the tension in the painting.
At the same time, we were making work about the violent years of Sendero Luminoso [the so-called Shining Path, a terrorist group with Maoist-Marxist-Leninist affiliations] in Peru, especially in the Ayacucho area. Although the violence had been heavy for years, we sensed the same tension remained in the Peruvian landscape as in Poussin’s paintings. That said, we did not want to confuse terrorism with the work of the French painter because the type of violence that appears in his paintings was not political, they were crimes of passion, commonplace murder. So, maintaining the idea, we went on to recreate notorious homicides in Lima that had left their mark on the collective memory.
[Left] © Colectivo MR ‘Urban Still Life VI’ from the series ‘Urban Still Lifes’ 2013
[Right] © Colectivo MR ‘Urban Still Life VII’ from the series ‘Urban Still Lifes’ 2013
You draw on the work of another Baroque painter, this time from Spain, in your series ‘Urban Still Lifes’, which echoes the distinctive imagery of Juan Sánchez Cotán.
MR: We made this series in Buenos Aires, and it arose from our concern about the increasing number of homeless people in the city.
The paintings of Sánchez Cotán, like those of Poussin, contain mysteries. He made a series of still lifes [which depict fruits and vegetables hanging by strings within a small pantry] that represented human vanity and the transitory nature of life itself. We applied the same aesthetic concept but changed the luxurious fruits for objects bought from people who were living on the streets of Buenos Aires. Thus, continuing with our concept of critique expressed in an appealingly artistic way, we denounced a serious problem through an aesthetic image. And it is a problem that not only continues today but is increasing.
In both those series you draw on the history of art as a means to express pressing contemporary concerns. Why do you choose this approach rather than a more direct (say documentary) approach?
MR: We are neither journalistic photographers nor documentary filmmakers. We are artists and our vision of current events is expressed from an artistic point of view. As artists, we are heirs to the history of art, forming a modest link in a creative chain with our ancestors from whom we have received lessons and concepts. Sometimes we follow the history of art and use references such as the work of Poussin and Sánchez Cotán, other times we do not.
How did the series ‘The Five have to Work’ begin?
R: Another of society’s serious problems is child labour. I remember that when I was a child, I read the stories of the Famous Five by the English writer Enid Blyton [simply called Los Cinco – the Five – in Spanish]. She described a bourgeois childhood where the eponymous protagonists lived carefree lives, having little adventures that always ended well. We imagined what it would be like if those upper-middle-class children had to work and cast them in a reality far removed from those comfortable fantasies.
That’s why the series is called ‘The Five have to work’. It is a wake-up call for teenagers who live comfortably to remind them that there are other children their age who have to work to survive and have no time to play or to dream.
M: No children appear in this series. Rather the impossibility of child workers living a happy, carefree, dreamy, adventurous, imaginative, naive childhood is conveyed symbolically through the placement of toys.
Child workers are not like the Famous Five, they are their antithesis, they do not have a childhood. At least two and a half million children under fifteen years of age work under miserable conditions in Lima and the surrounding countryside.
If I understand correctly, the locations for each of these photographs is a place where children actually work but the location remains unidentified? Why is this?
MR: Several of the photographs are set in places of child labour while others were shot in a studio. The idea of not identifying the exact place is to emphasise that this scene could be happening almost anywhere in the world. It was important that the children themselves did not appear in the image because we did not want to simply portray individuals as victims or make so-called misery porn. It is much more devastating to show a toy left untouched because the child has no time to play with it. One sees horrible images every day. Given this overexposure to violence and evil, we believe that aesthetic images that strongly denounce violence and evil, are the ones that leave their mark on you.
Back in 2008 you made a powerful body of work about children. How did ‘Putis’ begin and what does it represent?
R: Putis is a small town near the city of Ayacucho in the southern area of the Peruvian Andes. It is the place where the largest mass grave was found dating back to a massacre by the military during the years of internal war [a violent armed conflict between the government and Shining Path that lasted from 1980 to 2000].
It is impossible to forget the pain of seeing those mothers or grandmothers who recognised the clothes recovered from the mass grave. They had made those clothes themselves, with their own hands and with much love for their cherished children and grandchildren. Making this work was especially painful for us, because those small clothes held the memory of such an absurd, unbounded violence in which the lives of many children were brutally cut short.
M: Friends from the Peruvian forensic anthropology team told us that they would be holding an exhibition in Ayacucho of the clothes recovered from the mass grave in Putis. Identifying the victims was hampered by the fact that the DNA bank in Peru is very small. However, people from the mountains usually knit clothes for their relatives, each piece being unique and potentially recognisable to its maker. So, they were going to use this method to try to discover the identity of the victims.
The exhibition was a very sad event, with tragic scenes of grieving relatives. Seeing these clothes of very small children affected us greatly.
Putis: On 13 December 1984, members of the Peruvian Army based at Putis ordered the men of the community to dig a pit for the construction of a fish farm. When the digging was completed, the troops gathered hundreds of people around the alleged pool – men, women, and children – and, without further explanation, shot them.
Teodosia Condorai Quispe was one of the survivors of the massacre. She lost ten members of her family. After the exhumation of the grave, she managed to identify seven of them. No soldier has been convicted of crimes against the civilian population of Putis.
In your series ‘Landscape Without Figures’, you returned to the subject of mass murders in the conflict between the military government and the insurgents during the 1980s and 1990s. Why, for you, is it important to maintain the memory of collective trauma?
MR: Recovering historical memory is fundamental to our work. Many of the problems that are happening now – and the radical positions of young people supporting emerging fascism – arise from an ignorance of history. This is why our work tries to maintain the memory of past violence in order that it is not repeated. In this series, relatives of the murdered people appear along with the empty spaces where they were executed.
Barrios Altos: On the night of 3 November 1991, a pollada was taking place on the first floor of No. 840 Jiron Huanta to raise funds for the repair of the building. At approximately 23:30 hours, six armed and hooded individuals entered the building. The attackers ordered the meeting attendees to lie on the floor, where they then fired indiscriminately for about two minutes. Fifteen people were killed including an eight-year-old child and four others were seriously injured, with one left permanently paralysed. It was verified that the attackers were members of the military and were after a meeting of rebels which actually took place on the floor above.
Felipe León León survived. He was shot seven times and still has a bullet in the body. Since that day, he has suffered from discrimination by his neighbours, who still think he is a terrorist.
Your approach to art making takes a variety of conceptual forms, often indirect – suggesting as much as making evident. How do you hope it will influence attitudes?
MR: For us, we are not interested in simply visually pleasing art, we are interested in a poetic aesthetic that carries its power deep within it, that provokes thought by raising questions, that is both visually engaging and affectively uncomfortable. The paradox is that most of our works about racism are bought by racist people. They buy them for reasons of artistic taste, but at the same time they take into their home an anti-racist statement – a seed that over time might bear fruit.
In making this work together, what have you learned about yourselves?
MR: We are very different yet very similar at the same time. Our work creates a solidity in our friendship that is beyond convention. Working together and learning from each other is an extraordinary experience. We have a strong bond. We never argue but we do talk a lot and we undertake research to find the common point we share that makes our work solid and coherent.
Biographical Notes
Marina García Burgos was born in Lima, Peru, in 1968. She studied photography in the Kodak Center in Lima in 1994, the International Center of Photography in New York in 1995 and styling and art direction at the Central Saint Martin School of Design in London in 2003. She established her photographic studio in 1996 working mainly in advertising and fashion, switching to documentary and artistic projects in 2004.
Ricardo Ramón Jarne was born in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1961. He holds a doctoral degree in the history of art from the University of Zaragoza (2021) and works as an art critic, writer, and cultural administrator. He is currently director of the Cultural Center of Spain in San José, Costa Rica.
Colectivo MR formed in 2006 with the mission to make visible what society insists on making invisible. Their work has featured in seven solo and three group exhibitions in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Spain, and the USA, receiving extensive coverage in the press.
Photo [details]: Pedro Zelaya
This interview is a Talking Pictures original.