Issue # 9 Raura Oblitas

Curated by: Nicole Franchy

Raura Oblitas’ sculptural work is engrained on architectural studies, urban processes and commemorative signs in the public realm and how these affect our collective memory and identity formation. Her studies of the city of Lima, her hometown, and its informal and structural precariousness contrast with its recent modern urban narrative of economic growth.LOTE (which means plot of land) fluctuates between the space of the museum or gallery, and the urban intervention, a permanent axis of Oblitas’ work. While bringing the public sphere into the gallery, it delves into the idea of the anti-monument, the meaning behind commemorative gestures and community, as a means to challenge public use of space versus the privacy of inhabiting it. 

The artist began her research photographing both the monuments of the main squares of Lima, as well as the sculptures in niches and mausoleums that are born from a more intimate memory. A strong influence for LOTE are The Cells, a series by Louise Bourgeois, where the viewer observe the pieces through a metal screen or mesh, and which plays with the idea of the intimate as refuge or as a confined cage.

The background for LOTE is the artist’s returning interest in Villa El Salvador, Lima’s first urban autonomous self-managed community, mostly inhabited by immigrants from the interior of the country. In 2014, Oblitas was invited on a research trip, answering an open call where sculptors would propose monuments on one of the district’s main avenues, where they would locate several commemorative statues of national historical leftist personalities who helped consolidate the aforementioned district. Whilst the open call never came to fruition, the artist noted that the memorial of Maria Elena Moyano, a famous feminist Afro Peruvian activist and socialist leader who was instrumental since the 70’s in Villa El Salvador’s community organizations, was left alone on a visibly abandoned public space. Oblitas’ investigative immersion on the relevance of the claim for a socialist autonomous ideal past, along with that lonesome monument seemed key to understanding the idea of a monument and specifically the significance of a commemorative plaque.

Four flagpoles without flags receive the viewer inside the gallery, a sunset metal sculpture accompanies the flagpoles - channeling the logo from the real estate agency operating in the neighborhood but also reminding the viewer of fence edges which are very present throughout the city as a sign of shielding private property. The accompanying series constitutes a sequence in which all two-dimensional platforms – bronze and marble plates - arranged on the gallery walls are deliberately vandalized, boxed in meshed metal bars, burned and ripped in different ways, making it impossible to keep a clean gaze on them. Each raw gesture on refined materials tends to symbolically void the values associated with the political collective memory often inscribed and represented on these plaques. Vandalized bronze plaques and elegant black marbles are scratched with a hand drawn subdivision plan and so the artist stretches these notions by enclosing the spectator themself, guiding their gaze and the meanderings around the exhibition space. The feeling of insubordination towards a liberal economic use of space imposing on the dwelling experience - where gentrification has taken over the limits of private and public space -, also signals social divide within the city. 

As the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement - one of the largest anti-racist protests in North American history - has gained massive international support, we are invited to a de-colonial tour de force re-visiting the history of colonialism and the asymmetrical representation of the public sphere. In a context where toppling or beheading of monuments of figures such as Christopher Columbus or Leopold II emerge all over, Raura Oblitas’ ahead of their time vigilant gestures on LOTE’s memorial plaques reminds us to actively inquire who gets to be memorialized and the cognitive dangers of dignifying colonialism and its actors.

Nicole Franchy