A place for unresolvable conflict: E.P.S Huayco’s performance Sarita Colonia as DIY affective urbanism

Abstract

During the last decades of the 20th century, Latin America has been involved in a series of internal armed conflicts motivated by socialist utopias and social restructure. Particularly in Peru, the devastation of rural communities forced mass migrations to Lima, the capital city. This produced changes in the urban fabric through urgent and precarious architecture on apparently inhabitable terrains. In a few years, the urban landscape obtained a hybrid composition (between urban and rural) where the Andean migrants demanded space and recognition within the new dynamics that the now cohabit in.

It was through discursive actions such as ephemeral architecture and performance, that the migrant communities’ symbols proclaimed the metropolis and resignified public places by ascribing them with new signs, values and a sense of belonging. In particular, the collective E.P.S Huayco utilized popular and mestizo images to create such places. Sarita Colonia (1981), a “moment/monument” – an action and ephemeral sculpture – was one of their works in which the figure of a saint not recognized by the Catholic Church was created with more than 10, 000 cans of evaporated milk. Named “the saint of the migrants”, Sarita Colonia was a popular figure in which E.P.S Huayco was able to perceive and depict the complexity of the new dwellers. This example generates a new approach towards political assemblies as they not only vocalize claims and conditions of possibility but create symbols in the common imagination; fundamental components to conceive life in an urban space.

Sarita Colonia makes us re-think the elements that constitute landscape in which discursive landmarks are complemented with affects and personal memories. With this, the unilateral perspective of the disruptive performance Sarita as a tool for socialist revolution is expanded. So its poetics can also be framed as DIY affect-based urbanism and place-making mechanism. A branch of urbanism that frames place-making as a construction of alternatives that is only possible as it is impossible.