Lava la bandera

The Colectivo Sociedad Civil and the Cultural Overthrow of the Fujimori-Montesinos Dictatorship

GUSTAVO BUNTINX

Ars brevis, vita longa

Liminaries

The overthrow of a dictatorship is not usually the result of a single masterstroke, but rather of the slow yet relentless construction of democratic consensus in each sector of civil society. There is a cultural overthrow of dictatorship as important and decisive as its economic, political, or military overthrow. For what is thus obtained is an alteration of public consciousness that is also an awakening of the most intimate individual consciousness — and a lasting turn in the prevailing common sense of the times. Such transformations are not necessarily foreign to artistic initiatives, when these are subject to an extreme — and critical — socialization. The struggle for symbolic power in the public sphere — in public space itself — encouraged for Peru the reconstruction of those civic ethics that the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori and Vladimiro Montesinos pretended to suppress by generalizing among the population a certain post-(civil)war syndrome. A major contribution to this liberating process was the overflow of an ethical agenda that for years had been consolidating itself from within the relatively sheltered spaces of art: the stubborn will to expand the limits of what is speakable, sayable, conceivable even, in a social context where political repression was often internalized as psychic repression.

(Self)Censorships

The task was to fight the power, of course, but not just under its evident manifestations as a de facto regime. The struggle was also — and more crucially — against the subtle prolongations of the dictatorship into the individual habits and cultural practices that sustained that despotic power and made it viable. The cultural overthrow of dictatorship is not content or complete with the mere discrediting and displacement of the tyrant of the hour. It also implies the slow but decisive transformation of our traditions, all so authoritarian, demagogic, clientelist, caudillistas. ... And it requires as well the arduous construction of a new civil society. A new citizenship, an active citizenship, articulated beyond the state, before the political parties, as a vital and living participatory act: a live and alive intervention in the social processes — and in history itself. This strategy made it possible for core groups of persons emerging from the visual arts scene to contribute in a decisive way to the still recent democratic turn in Peru. A feat accomplished through a cultural praxis that offered a differential plus to the struggle for citizenship: a symbolic surplus value.

The results were artistic experiences that radically socialized themselves to the point of renouncing their own specificity, generating instead groups of critical intervention in the broader cultural and political spheres. Due to testimonial needs and space restraints, I will here comment only on the Colectivo Sociedad Civil (Civil Society Collective, also known by its Spanish acronym CSC). And due to reflexive exigencies, I will privilege, out of the Colectivo's ample trajectory, the republican rituals it conceived for the recovery of a civic self-esteem, rescuing public space for a democratic praxis, restoring the city to the citizenry.

Les Mots et les Choses

Even in its self-assumed denomination, the Colectivo Sociedad Civil suggested a sense and purpose that went beyond any artistic or partisan vocation. The CSC intended instead to prioritize the factual and symbolic reconstitution of our usurped citizenship — and of its lost social fabric. With this prospect in mind, the CSC postulated the cultural edification of democracy as the necessary dialectical complement of the cultural overthrow of dictatorship. The underlying premise was that only cultural change renders any social or political modification irreversible. We must, however, avoid any messianic temptation. The trajectory of this and other groups is only part of a vast and diverse scene. And the origins of that "move" (rather than movement) go back at least to the protests provoked in 1997 by the dismissal of the members of the Constitutional Guarantees Tribunal. This arbitrary measure was meant to dismantle the juridical obstacles to an illicit presidential re-reelection already in the works, in flagrant violation even of the fraudulent charter imposed by the dictatorship itself. The civic mobilizations against this abuse thus became the prelude for a new political sentiment.

The unprecedented overflows of that cultural-political libido infiltrated and corroded and overwhelmed the logics of psychosocial control made instrumental by the regime through the fascistoid imperatives of martialization and simulacrum: the exacerbation in local terms of a certain generalized symbolic embezzlement that would characterize our (post)modern times, transforming Peru into a pauperized society of spectacle. Especially in its televised version: from the news-less news programs to the reconstructed assaults on the Japanese ambassador's residence, the fujimontesinista power structure evidenced itself as a pathetic but hypnotic reality show whose deliberate manifestation would precisely be Laura Bozzo, the infamous show-woman, almost in the same way that the so-called Vladivideos acted as that system's terminal Freudian slip.

Sex, Lies, and...