Whats does it mean to turn your back on your land? 

Dorota Biczel

2017

You: I imagine you reading this in the Luis Miro Quesada Garland Room, a few blocks away and with a fast track through the Pacific Ocean. I imagine you identify as Peruvian. I also imagine that you learned all about your land and its unique composition. Probably, this "unique composition" that was taught from school, signified as three different geographical areas that, supposedly, define your country: the coastal desert; the Andes’ Sierra; and, the Amazon rainforest. In this construction of the national imaginary, the borders delimit an internally fragmented Peru, in the shape of a jaguar without a tail. They also delineate an empty terrain around that Peru.

Claudia Coca's recent work fills a void in the Peruvian pictorial imaginary - the imaginary from which the Pacific has historically been absent. Her work replaces that absence with presence and, at the same time, refutes the familiar symbols created for the observers, external and internal, of the Peruvian territory. To this end, Coca exploits a dual phenomenon: on the one hand, landscapes linked to territorial, national or imperial borders; on the other, landscapes that transcend those borders, mediating the transnational circulation of capital, goods and people. She insists on the inversion of three different looks; three different positions; and, three different and historical modes of the construction and deployment of the territory in the Andean region of Latin America: one, that of a Spanish conqueror; the second, that of an enlightened imperial scientific explorer; and, the third, that of a coastal woman in search of her roots. Unlike those three observers, whose gazes are firmly fixed on the land, Coca turns his back on the desert, the mountains and the jungle beyond them. She faces the ocean. Watch with her; come down from the boardwalk; cross the Costa Verde highway; touch the water.

Hers are unprecedented images: the ocean seen and experienced as a shimmering, undulating surface; the play of light on the peaks of the waves; the ebb and flow of the tide; endless expansion. Her ocean is devoid of buoys, piers, or lighthouses; boats, birds or flying fish. To put it in different terms, Coca refuses to show you any marker associated with a territory, mature and ready, for extraction and exploitation.

The back-turning on the earth suggests a possibility of destabilizing the terrestrial social order. Turning to the ocean offers a possibility of rejecting the established myth of origin, of rootedness in the land; the same myths that have perpetuated racial and ethnic asymmetry in Peru since independence, that is, the image of the impenetrable sierra that has been coined in the name of capitalist modernization and "progress": the mountains that will be conquered and Indians and mestizos who will be turned into docile subjects, who will work to increase the GDP and thus satisfy metrics established elsewhere.

Instead, Coca puts you on the shore. The ocean invades you, over and over again. The distinction between land and water is fluid and porous. Coca takes you to the liminal space where the notions of "there" and "here", "forward" and "back", disappear; where the notion of the Other disappears. The ocean encompasses both you and me (the "me" writing from a great distance) - much greater power, much more sovereign than that established by geopolitical divisions.

The "barbarian" imagined by colonial powers turns his gaze - both defiantly and as a whole.