This installation is called “An Education,” photos are taken during exhibition A World of Many Worlds exhibition at CBK Zuidoost.

The installation parodies the way social systems teach how to stigmatise others. The work tries to mimic the system that, using the mass media, infiltrates within the multicultural household. For this I recreated the living room of my parents in Lima - Peru during my upbringing in the 80's. The big ceramic heads sitting on the sofa represent members of my family, including myself, watching TV content of that time, through a looping video I created (https://youtu.be/EiJQq8GAveA ). In the program poor people accepted racist comments, in order to gain some cents. And TV commercials sent messages about the ideal lifestyle, represented by white people. To recreate my parents living room in the 80’s, I bought furniture and photo frames from a secondhand shop, and made “family photos” making the big ceramic heads represent the members of my family in the photo as well .

For the ceramic masks hanging on one wall, I used my own face as a model, to represent the many society fears, dreams, types of oppression and invisibility. Some of the masks have a text on them. They are the adjectives of racial rejection, that racially mixed and indigenous people get from others. These feelings are inside the collective subconscious, sometimes I also experienced them in my identifications as a Peruvian.

A Peruvian middle class social convention is also observed in the installation, by mimicking the way of “sitting at home” within the middle and upper middle class family. The sculpture of a servant is sitting next to the sculpture of the house cat on the floor, on a lower physical position than the boss of the house. The public can engage, by sitting on the chairs or on the rug to watch the video.

The work borrows inspiration from the ancestral Peruvian sculpture, such as Cabezas Clavas (stone heads) from Chavin culture and Mochica ceramics. Materials I used were stoneware, earthware and engobe. The big heads are 30 to 45 cm circumference. The masks are human face size.