Armando Andrade Tudela

LIMA, PERU (1975)

In 2013, I made the film UNSCH/Pikimachay, which examined the role of Universidad Nacional de Huamanga (UNSCH), an experimental educational project founded in the Peruvian Andes, as the backdrop during the formation of the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path. This project highlighted the complex relationships between pedagogy, vanguard, dogma and militancy in Peru’s recent history.

The film I am presenting for Itinerarios XXVII, entitled La Verdad ha cambiado (The Truth Has Changed), continues to explore these correlations and this time focuses on the Fine Arts Faculty at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú —where I studied art in the 1990s—and the impact of the pedagogical method created by its founder Adolfo Winternitz on the local art scene. Based on the suppression of any political urges in favor of empirical, spiritual education, over time the “Winternitz method” was transformed into an ideology of artistic creation and reception that is still valid today. For those of us who were students in that Faculty, this period weakened any political experimental consciousness, as well as the possibility of forging a more subjective and undisciplined relationship with our artistic and social context.

La Verdad ha cambiado is based on a series of photomontages produced between 2018 and 2020, where I intersperse photographs from the Fine Arts Faculty archive with images that show different forms of physical torture and psychological abuse. My intention was to create a “mirror” space where dynamics of submission and domination could be integrated within the educational space of the Faculty and dissolve inside its pedagogical functioning.

The film records a series of group choreographies based on this play of reflections. Four actors, Julie Kieffer, Franck Lestard, Morgane Roumegoux and Bruno Silva, play roles of dominance and submission, rupture and establishment, based on a visual script constructed with the aforementioned photomontages. The actors wove a series of performative sequences where complementary roles and identities were assigned and reassigned. La Verdad ha cambiado documents these sequences, as well as the discussions generated around them. Vincent Guiomar built the film set in a barn west of Lyon, Hannes Bock was in charge of the lighting and cinematography, Julio Lugon designed the sound and Louise Porte coordinated the filming.