EPS Huayco, artistic recycling, and biopolitics in 1980s Lima

• In Event: Precarious Materialities and Artistic Production

Abstract

In October 1980, Peruvian collective EPS Huayco deployed nearly 12,000 empty recycled cans of evaporated milk to construct a grid-like support for the portrait of Sarita Colonia; an unofficial saint worshipped by the Limeño underclasses. This enormous portrait was placed on the mountain overlooking the Pan American Highway, on the outskirts of the city. In the local context, it constituted an unprecedented gesture—a monumental work of art was displaced from the sanctioned gallery circuit in the upper-class neighborhoods to the city’s periphery, facing one of the principal routes of migration from the economically impoverished provinces to the capital. Peruvian art critics took it up as the paradigmatic example of an authentic Peruvian form of expression that emerged as the result of a convergence of previously antagonistic social groups and their aesthetics—the criollo urban petit-bourgeoisie and the rural Andean poor.
My goal is to reexamine this ambitious and labor-intensive project, including its “poor” aesthetics, in the context of an unprecedented growth of Lima during the period and the democratic elections of 1980. What kind of a model citizen-subject was projected by the major political forces of the time? And what kind of labor would this subject perform? Specifically, what was the role of recycling in the economy of the city practically beyond the control of the state? Hence, how do we read the massive act of recycling undertaken by the artists of EPS Huayco and where do we locate the limits of their liberatory promise?

Author

• Dorota M Biczel, University of Texas/Austin