Murder and Tragedy Give Voice To A Local Peruvian’s Art

By Millie Hanson
Visual Arts Editor

Bertha Vásquez grew up in the bustling town of Chimbote, Peru, a city of around 350,000.  Chimbote is the biggest fishing port in the country and a main trade route into the interior of Peru. The town started out small (1,400 in 1900), then grew more than a hundred times bigger by the 1960s due mainly to the fishing industry. The town’s ancestry is quite mixed, thanks in part to international traffic: Over time European, Chinese, and Russian ships all made port there.

The neighborhood Bertha grew up in was known as a “teachers town”. In the 1980s Peru was a troubled country with the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the MRTA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) guerrillas terrorizing the poor farmers in the Andes and the government in Lima’s unable to control the chaos in the cities.  Her mother, a teacher and union member, took to the streets with her friends and fellow teachers in protest of the government’s inability to govern the country and to keep it’s citizens safe from the Shining Path, and the MRTA.

Women are often put at the front of a political march because the pervasive Catholic religion commands respect for any Holy Mother figure and therefore gave some safety to the front-line marchers. But always, her mother was prepared to run from bombs and would return home quite often with just one shoe. This all made a lasting impression on Vásquez, who speaks in accented English.

“If we didn’t like something, we took to the streets. Today I’m going to take the building.” She laughed then, but she survived the worst of it. Peru’s history is one of unrest and since the 1980s, Peruvians have seen the rise and fall of the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla Civilians were caught in between the army and the enforced “protection” of the guerillas which became less about a people’s liberation movement and more about control over time.

“If you have enough guts, you don’t speak – you just do it…you are going to go there…you are going to take action. We embrace activity, we respect our voice, we do not take it for granted.”

Bertha was a lawyer in Peru,  but as a teenager she wanted to be an artist and go to college for that, but her father (who paid for her university education) told her.

“Art is just a hobby, and I’m not paying for that. You can choose to be an engineer or a lawyer.” Art is not a profession for Peruvians. Not unless one lives in or near the capital of Lima.  Berta chose to become a lawyer because, as she said, she loves to talk. She worked as a law clerk for two years after graduation and ended up meeting her husband Nathan Clarke while he was working and traveling in Peru while studying for his Master’s Degree.

Bertha and Nathan came to Fargo-Moorhead in 2008, previous to that they were at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Clarke earned his PhD and Vásquez took ESL classes since she spoke no little English. She went on to get her Masters in Spanish Literature (both teach at MSUM). She never told people she had a degree in law or even what country she was from.  There were times Bertha was taken aback by the snap judgments some people made, that she is a Mexican illegal, and by the disgusted looks and nasty comments.

Moving to a new place can be challenging but Vásquez found the community she was looking for in the art department at MSUM. She took a drawing class, remembering she used to like to draw, and was and still is very happy with the Art and Design department, especially her sculpture professor, the technical support, and her classmates. She spends most of her weekends on campus, “ trying to think, trying to connect.”

In “Argentina’s Identity,” she deals with the tragedy of Argentina’s Dirty War that took place during a time of military dictatorship and state-sponsored acts of repression, torture, and assassination.

“One of the most macabre events was the abduction and subsequent murder of several mothers and pregnant women (after birth, the children were taken from their families and put up for adoption, often in the abductors’ families.)”

Vásquez sewed 102 handkerchiefs that represent the number of grandchildren that have been found and reunited with their biological families. She stencil-sprayed the faces of victims onto white handkerchiefs, chosen because of the protesting grandmother who silently marched in Buenos Aires’ central square wearing them as a symbol of peace.

In her “Bride of Ciudad Juarez,” “I used stencils to spray paint the faces of actual victims – either murdered or missing – women whose families are still looking for them and for justice. At first, the murdered women were migrant factory workers and other poor women whose murders did not concern the local government or the multinational factory owners. Due to the rise of drug trafficking and the gang warfare in Juárez, the murders have increased to become a massacre of women of different ages, social status, and occupations.”

Peru’s Alberto Fujimori is the subject of her latest piece with “The Dictator’s Strings.” He was president from 1990 until 2000, when his fraudulent re-election was rejected and he fled into exile. He was subsequently tried and convicted of a multitude of crimes.

“As an artist, I wanted to employ the form of a kipu in order to record the dictator’s face and legend. Following the style of kipu knotting, I aspired to create volume and to record our community’s history, and to stamp Fujimori in our memory.” Kipu (also spelled quipu) a method of recording information, used in the Inca empire which ruled in and around modern-day Peru. These “talking strings” were known to have from a few knots to upwards of 2,000 and used Base-10 like our number system does.

“I believe that a people should not forget history. We need to look back so we do not repeat the same mistakes and remember to respect the struggle of those who overthrew dictators with their ideas, actions, or their lives.”

Finally, she said “it is my responsibility as an artist to give life to a vision of my culture, my pain, my inspiration, my people, and the beautiful struggle that makes us stronger.  My statement is not static, it is still growing and maturing as my experiences are still happening in this country which allows me to be an artist and to connect myself past, present and future.”

For more information about Bertha Vásquez’s work, visit her Facebook art page by searching for Ber Vásquez Art, then click on Photos.

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IF YOU GO
What: “The Dictator’s Strings” by Bertha Vásquez
When: Now through Oct. 21, 2011
From Oct. 24th-28th Vásquez will be showing in the Sculpture Studio gallery located in CA174. It will be about cultivation of tomatoes in Florida and the practical labor slavery of immigrants
Where: The Roland Dille Center for the Arts, MSUM 1st Floor, around the corner from CA174
Cost: Free