Repasos

The use of chalk in the series Repasos is a metaphor for the fragility of a people’s historical memory, in general, and that of Peruvians in particular. It would be so easy to erase the drawings and texts on these blackboards, just like what has apparently happened with the memories of those difficult years under Alan García’s first government.

In December 2015, the critic and curator Max Hernández said of this work: “In the series of blackboards found in Repasos, Miguel Aguirre recreates images taken from newspapers and magazines published during the second half of the 1980s: communiqués from political and business organizations on economic or labor policies, commercials from financial entities offering astronomical interest rates that lay bare the magnitude of monetary devaluation during those years, advertising for products that attempt to solve structural problems in an oversimplified way or optimistic messages in the face of the disaster through which the country lived. The chalk alludes to education and an implicit form of learning in which the media played a key role, but one for which they have refused to take responsibility.”