Production: LOT Theater.
Concept: Carlos Cueva, Carlos Javier Vega and Sergio Zevallos.
Presented at the festival "Zona Fronteriza - Simposio Más allá del Teatro" Lima-Perú 2005, a project from LOT Theater that develops experimental interventions of public areas, to involve those in the process of arts.

In Clase Media the action develops through the variation of a sculptural scene. A ritualistic act of civil punition occurs next to a passive group of soldiers, whose bodies are gradually, erotically exposed. The unusual clash of these contradictory moments shows ambivalent feelings within the middle class, a class that has grown up struggling to maintain its social status in the face of political violence. Specifically, the performance portrays masculine identity and eroticism under such conditions.

This project was supported by the Erna und Victor Hasselblad Foundation - Research Grant in Photography, 2003.

Beauty Salon is a photography research about contemporary "locations of cultural colonialism". The project was focused in the suburban areas of the Latin American metropolis. The locations were the beauty salons situated in the "barrios populares" –urban slums– of Lima, Peru.
The beauty salons of Lima are a habitat themselves; visited by a very mixed group of customers, like domestic servants, soldiers off duty, prostitutes, jobless, transvestites: people in a precarious, uncertain situation, who try to improve their quality of life by making use of the beauty treatment.
In fact, the treatment at the beauty salons is a kind of mimetic procedure (mostly through a simple hair bleaching) that aims to merge the mestizo appearance of the costumer whit some TV influenced imagery of beauty.
During the project I extended my researches to other social circumstances that I found in the surrounding streets. The final concept includes materials from the beauty salons, the prostitution areas, the morgue of Lima and a police station.
For the presentation of this project I decided to combine both, the documentary approach and the artistic elaboration of the visual material.

I find my subjects in the public spaces of urban areas, but also in the private sphere of single individuals who, in a certain way, have a split relationship to their social environment. Later I combine the material of several researches in a series of photographs by working with non-linear methods of narrating. I call them portraits of contemporary desires.