Historia del Cosmos

The way of arriving at this project departs from coincidences on a street in Lima’s historic center. An antique shop sold travel slides from tourist attractions, and a few loose sequences of Sonoviso, with more local images and themes close to the Peruvian context. I thus see it as pedagogical material. What is curious is their area. Sonoviso is an association of cultural audiovisual production, education and photography, video and audio services, and the Episcopal Commission of Catechesis and the Pastoral Bible Institute had hired their services. These albums circulated between the years 1975 and 1989 and narrate, through different local symbologies, extracts from the Bible. A subtle way of cultivating the Christian faith.

Many of my projects begin with personal anecdotes and journeys that stumble on found objects. História do cosmos [History of the Cosmos] emerged from one of the most common routes in antique shops across downtown Lima, but also merges with my post-photographic and engraving practices.

I think that creative ability blends, consciously and unconsciously, with our political opinions about something. Aesthetics can help achieve a frontal or subtle point regarding these stances. Personally, it is inevitable that my work lets out criticisms regarding political situations, which may be silenced by moralistic attitudes, ignorance, or lack of awareness. História do cosmos intends to play with these concepts, a voice that erupts with the ideas that remain in the bottom of consciousness as "culture, to create itself, power, stars, dust,” a poetical or political paraphrasing.

Elizabeth Vásquez Arbulú​ in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (August 2017)