CHICHA LAND PROPOSAL

Chicha Land is an ephemeral installation made up of posters, paintings, advertising,

photography, records and "chicha" newspapers, and dozens of objects found and made on
the streets of Europe in a dialogue without hierarchies between post-empires and post-
colonies (in the manner of Georges Adéagbo and the peruvian chichódromos)

In the early 1980s, a new music called chicha (also known as cumbia and/or Peruvian
tropical music) was born in Peru. It was the music of the emigrants, of those who had fled
the countryside, of war, of misery, but also of those who had brought with them joy,
courage and hope. In parallel with the chicha sound, a mixture of vernacular melodies and
western instruments, a graphic design full of colors and playful typography was developed
appearing first on the album covers, and later on concert and party posters.

This graphic, coming from the lower classes, was considered of "bad taste" and was
marginalized by the middle and upper classes for many years. Currently this situation has
changed and this graphic that emerged from the streets is increasingly used as a creative
input by contemporary and urban artists in Peru.

In Chicha Land we use the chicha posters (which are serigraphs on paper where
fluorescent colors prevail) and different objects (visual and sonorous) associated with this
aesthetic in a DIY way to create an installation that gives the sensation of being on a
dance floor or chicha nightclub (which in Peru is called chichodromo) or walking down a
popular street in any Peruvian (or Latin American) city.

To the bricolage of these elements are added others found in the streets of the city space
where the installation is carried out. The idea is that Chicha Land appropriates elements of
street aesthetics, not only Peruvian or Latin American, but also European, as happened in
the assembly made in Berlin; creating a dialogue without hierarchies between post-colonial
and post-imperial countries.

The chicha aesthetic is culturally anthropophagous. It appropriates elements of the native

culture but also of Western culture, cannibalizing them for his own interests. The result is
always a melting pot, a hybridity, a miscegenation more parricidal than bastard and
therefore it is very difficult to classify and also to differentiate where the elements of the
native culture and those of the transnational culture are found.

The cities of Europe have been experiencing a migratory process for decades that is
changing their faces and their neighborhoods. If «chicha» is the appropriation of a migrant
culture of transnational elements, we could speak of a process of "achichamiento" in
Europe; that is, of appropriation and transformation of European cultural codes by the
various migrant movements.

Chicha Land is an installation that comes from the Peruvian street aesthetic and can be
display in a closed space but it also has the possibility of intervening, with its colors and
sounds, in the public space. In the case of the choosen city, the idea would be to interact
with the groups that make urban art and in the neighborhoods where migration is more
present. Central and South Americans, but also from Arab and African countries. The
aesthetics of color and music would be the unifying element of these migratory diasporas.

Chicha Land can also create its materials and supplies collectively, through serigraphy and
photography workshops with the population of the location, migrant and non-migrant, the
idea is to made a process of collective creation where the hierarchies of nationalities are
broken, but also those of class, age and gender.

Likewise, the assembly and even the final curatorship can be a process of collective
creation, where the idea of the curator as a figure of control and director, is diluted in that
of an important participant but above all immersed in a collective and relational process.
What is sought is that the construction of a social organism is at the same time a work of
art because, paraphrasing Joseph Beuys, «every human being is an artist»

The final result of the subsequent collective and collaborative process is always a surprise.
It's architecture/social sculpture, it's Do It Yourself, it's punk, it's anarchism, it's solidatity,
it's chicha.