Les Egusquiza (b. Peru) | Adentro (Inside)
My name is Les Egusquiza, a Peruvian artist based in Lima.
My work explores Peruvian territories through painting and video. Since the beginning of lockdown, I have been developing a new way to connect with my painting and video practice through a visual diary based on my daily activities, memories and states of mind in Lima.
I have been showing my artwork in cultural spaces focusing on minorities since 2013. Likewise, I photograph women and socio-political protests for the feminist audiovisual collective “Mujer Dispara”.
In my last solo show in Vigil Gonzales Lima Gallery, “El Lugar entre el Cielo y la Tierra (2020)”, I created a series of nine pale colours skyscapes and fictional landscapes in medium-size canvas and one short film made with recordings from my travels, before the pandemic, to the Amazon River, Ayacucho’s fields and skies from Lima.
The paintings were acquired for the private collection of Jorge M Perez in Miami. The film was exhibited alongside artists Luis Camnitzer, Anderson Barbata, Nierman, Garcia Torres at the "Festival del Silencio" in Mexico City.
My recent project "Adentro" was conceived during the lockdown and while doing a residency programme at Residencia Web Otro Norte (v10_ Contra el cine: strategies de insubordinación fílmica.)
Adentro (Inside)
"Adentro (Inside)" was conceived during my visits to Lima’s beaches, looking to find a safe place in the short times of permitted movement due to lockdown restrictions. During my visits, I projected my writing on the Pacific Ocean as a way to establish a communication between the sea and sky, hoping they could sense my wishes. This experience allowed me to reconnect with poetry and encouraged me to write poems related to the sense of a place lost and changed during the lockdowns.
This is the first piece of writing that I projected:
“Take away this pain
This ancient pain
Of time
Of decades
From other lives
I turn
inwards
Sky, you've seen all my lives
Earth lives
you and me
Several times”
The words projected on the rocks and the seafoam looked bright but blurry. This projection also registers moments of beautiful failure and glitches like my shaking hand, the blue screen, black cuts, adding visual noise to the film's aesthetic.
This project wants to create encounters where I narrate what happens to me and what I perceive from looking through my window during this lockdown. By observing landscapes, colour and poetry, my work expresses feelings of nostalgia, creates connections and a common experience, providing a space for exploring new ways of living despite the crisis.
I want to expand this action to new places and continue capturing the beauty and poetry from nature despite the adverse context of the ongoing global pandemic.
This is an ongoing project, and if you want to see it developing, please follow me on IG @lesegusquiza. I am currently applying for funding opportunities to produce this work. If you have funding ideas and sources, I would love to have a chat. My email is [email protected]