Nineteen Ninety

What does nineteen ninety bring to my mind? A reference to a particular time; if we are speaking of Peru, to a decidedly tragic moment in our nation’s recent history, a moment of uncertainty and chaos when it was impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel. There has been talk of tens of thousands of deaths, which were everyday occurrences then.

What might that same year bring to the mind of the artist Rudolph Castro, then a child? His games—but games charged with reality, those childhood war games in which, strangely, car bombs reflected the everyday life closest to him at the time. Through the things most familiar to him in childhood—games, dolls, Lego and school supplies—Castro evokes his memories and the landmarks in ours: Pucayacu, the Palca police station, the events in our Andes, those accounts of communities and entire families forced to migrate by senseless violence.

One + 69279, 50 kg of ANFO, 56 sticks of dynamite refer us to precise images in our Memory, to a memory many do not wish to recall. Yet by persisting in their refusal to confront it, they may also dare to learn nothing from past mistakes.

With these works, brought together in his exhibition Mi(l) Novecientos noventa, Rudolph Castro belongs to the small group of contemporary Peruvian artists who have felt the urgency to address through art this moment so full of horror in our history. At the same time, it is seen through the perspective and filter of his childhood memory, where Lego pieces become monuments to lost battles and his dolls are one more number among those 69279.