Rafael Hastings (1942–2020) was one of the most unclassifiable figures in Latin American experimental film and video art. Born in Lima, he studied in Brussels into the orbit of Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Béjart, and the experimental ferment of 1960s Europe — absorbing cinema, choreography, conceptual art, and countercultural politics before returning to Peru in the early 1970s with an ambition that defied any single medium.
This exhibition revisits a dimension of his practice that has remained almost entirely invisible until now: his work in film and video. At its centre is El incondicionado desocultamiento (1974), a 35mm experimental film believed lost for nearly five decades and recently recovered from the Filmoteca Española in Madrid. Shot across weeks of travel along the Peruvian coast — through the desert of Paracas and the ancient ceremonial complex of Sechín — the film weaves together pre-Columbian archaeology, Oriental mysticism, and speculative fiction into four short films that meditate on disappearance, transcendence, and the deep time of culture. Censored on its first release, screened only to a small circle of friends, and then quietly presumed gone, it is one of the most significant works of Latin American experimental cinema never to have entered the historical record.
Alongside the restored film, there is a projection of Hastings’ handwritten Diario de filmación — a production notebook dense with watercolours, technical calculations, collaged magazine clippings, and poetic instructions to himself — as well as16mm projection of raw footage of the film, making the materiality of celluloid itself part of the experience. Two recently recovered works, We Are Not a Family (1973) and Ceremony (1978), enable to trace the full arc of a decade in which Hastings produced thirteen audiovisual works and established himself as one of the most prolific and visionary experimental filmmakers in Latin America.
El incondicionado desocultamiento: Experimentaciones audiovisuales de Rafael Hastings was on view at the Espacio ICPNA San Miguel from 13 March to 26 April 2025.