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Category Archives: Curating

Thinking is a Hybrid Garden: the Mariotti – Luy Archive (1964-2024)

Posted on 2026-03-14

Thinking is a Hybrid Garden: the Mariotti – Luy Archive (1964-2024) showcases six decades of artistic and cultural work by Francesco Mariotti (Bern, Switzerland, 1943) and María Luy (Puerto Maldonado, Peru, 1950), revealing a pioneering body of work that intertwines technology, collectivity, nature, and social commitment. Spread across the galleries of the Museo de Arte de Lima – MALI and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima – MAC Lima, this exhibition provides a comprehensive overview on the Mariotti – Luy Archive, currently on loan to MALI. This archive contains historical documentation (photographs, newspaper clippings, magazines, posters, films, and other materials) spanning from the 1960s to the present, covering key moments in both local and international cultural production. Alongside these documents, numerous artworks trace the trajectory of both artists between Peru and Europe.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure the concept of the hybrid, a central theme in the artistic and cultural production of both artists. For Mariotti, the hybrid is not merely  a mixture of elements, but rather a complex form of existence that integrates seemingly opposing components, such as technology and nature. The concept derives from his installations known as Hybrid Gardens (or Quantum Gardens), in which distinct elements converge. For the artist, the hybrid is linked to plastic, waste, and consumer culture, as well as to magic, poetry, and art. It is both artificial and natural, and both organic and synthetic. In other words, it embodies a practice of resistance and transformation.

At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) poses new challenges regarding the relationship between humanity, technology, and nature, this exhibition offers a close look at several pioneering developments in this field. We present works that have never before been  exhibited in Peru, offering  multisensory and luminous experiences. These early projects foreshadow the evolution of artificial intelligences emerging in dialogue with diverse cultural traditions and worldviews, from Dadaism to Amazonian mythologies. The exhibition also highlights cultural management work that has been the driving force behind the prolific creative production of Francesco Mariotti and María Luy.

Co-Curated with Miguel A. López

El Incondicionado Desocultamiento: Experimentaciones Audiovisuales de Rafael Hastings

Posted on 2025-03-13

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.