MESA8 Residencies: Sept.-Oct. 2011

Peru’s Christians Luna is shining in the limelight these days at the MESA8 Residency Program for Latin American Artists. Stretching from Sept. thru Oct. 17 at the Tomé community (Casa Poli, Coliumo, region of Bío Bío, Chile), the artist has developed the Trueque project that drags in the community’s lifestyle in an effort to come up with participative alternatives that could eventually change the status quo of the community on a whole.

Luna (1979) considers himself “a researcher of things,” a visual artist and curator, a poet and a militant, a teacher of design and contemporary art. He lives and works in Peru’s Lima. Since 1998 he has made performances and interventions in public places. He’s the leader of Zona 30, a space of experimentation and residency, as well as the Platano Gallery, a nonpermanent collective endeavor that lampoons on the gallery’s need for his art. His work consists of a nonstop search of “situations” construed from the esthetic field and its related arts.

Coliumo is a village of peasants and fishermen in which Luna intends –by the hand of Trueque- to “help people understand that the local residents are the only ones that can actually transform the landscape if they really want to, thus putting authorities in dire straits and forcing them to pitch them a hand in that effort. This much is melted together to come up with a product, an event, an experience, a situation for sharing views that will continue generating creative processes.”

Over the past three years, the artists, the art professionals and the cultural managers that belong to MESA8 have provided residencies for creators with experience in projects, connected with the public, with social contexts, with cultural groups and teaching processes. The idea of each and every residency is to let an artist stay in a community for a period of time to work closely with both the environment and the community, thus developing actions that could also mean closer ties with the local artistic scene.

Source: Press release sent by Carolina Lara B.