Donde Habitas? (Que rica combinacion), Combimen

(top, bottom right) ¿Dónde Habitas? (Qué rica combinación), video, 4 min, 5th Festival Internacional de Video/Arte/Electronica, Lima, 2001. (bottom left) Combimen (Web-based video project, 2001-2002). (All works © Iván Lozano)

In recent years large-scale migration towards the Peruvian capital has generated many social and cultural changes. This has caused the appearance of new methods of development in the city of Lima. The invention of new means of subsistence creates a product with formal characteristics, but also with a new type of informality. Public transport reflects the new popular aesthetics of a changing city, resulting from the union of different cultures with the proximity of formerly distant human groups. The journey inside public transport is linked to the idea of dressing and undressing (getting on, getting off) analogous to acceptance and rejection (hostility = migration) or to the adoption and refusal of some attitudes and cultural elements. The walls of the streets describe changes in our society; they are a mixture resulting from Lima's peculiar development, posters with different things written on them, graffiti with political, commercial or fashionable aims, etc. My works are a new approach to this new aesthetics, using massive and reachable media: introducing new human groups to a reality that seems far away from our society, searching for an identity that until now was denied by our collective minds. Contact: Iván Lozano di Natale, Mz "R" Lote 1, Carlos Mellet, San Judas Tadeo, Chorrillos, Lima, Perú. E-mail: <lagarto_rojo@yahoo.com>.