Gustavo Buntinx, is an art historian and author of the book E.P.S. Huayco. Documentos (Lima, Centro Cultural de España, 2005). Born in Buenos Aires and resident in Lima for many years, Gustavo Buntinx is director of the Cultural Centre of the National University of San Marcos in Lima and leads the Micromuseum (There’s Room at the Back) project, a museum-archive initiative set around different meanings of the term “micro”, in the sense of small, transportable, public and nomadic. He is the author of numerous works on Latin American visual arts and forms part of the Colectivo Sociedad Civil (Civil Society Collective), active participants in the social movement that contributed so much to the (cultural) fall of the dictator Alberto Fujimori in the year 2000.

Huayco is the Quechua word that describes the collapse or avalanche of mud and stone that devastates all in its path, but at the same time regenerates the land’s fertility, a frequent phenomenon in the rainy season in the Andes Mountains. It also refers, by extension, to a flood of immigrants that descends en mass from the sierra to the coastal towns (in only three decades, most of the Peruvian population was converted from rural to urban).

This migration radically and irreversibly transformed the social and cultural identity of the Peruvian capital’s grass roots residents and brought to the surface what the Peruvian critic Mirko Lauer now understands as a new popular modernity (“only the popular is really modern in Peru today” he claims). Huayco is, appropriately, the name chosen by a group of artists active on the Lima art scene during the late seventies and early eighties and whose practice reformulates the links between art and politics, literary (or rather, illustrated) culture and new popular culture. In front of this thought-provoking name they placed the initials E.P.S. (Estética de Proyección Social [Aesthetic of Social Projection]) a direct reference to Empresa de Propiedad Social [Socially-Owned Company], the name given to co- operatives promoted by the State during the reformist leadership of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975).

Among other measures, this government introduced agricultural reform and moved for the recognition of Quechua as an official language. Buntinx believes that the E.P.S. Huayco experience represents “the symbolic culmination (eventually frustration) of a revolutionary moment as intense as it was fleeting – the radical articulation of the enlightened-middle-class and the emergent-popular movement that was projected in the anti- dictatorship struggle of the late seventies. It would subsequently become diluted under the conflicting pressures of electoral logic and the logic of the (civil) war”, which had been raging from 1980 between the Sendero Luminoso fundamentalist guerrillas and the country’s forces of repression.

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