I mean, the very first simple question is, what is ATA?

It’s a non-profit organization, a structure that I founded in 1995, when I was extremely young. I invited Gianni Toti, a media artist–so-called father of video poetry–an Italian audiovisual artist, to Lima – and that’s how we started it; and then we founded a festival. At that time, there were many festivals all over the world, but I was very lucky because I had an opportunity to work a lot at the CIdV, at the Centro Internacional de Video, which was an emblematic place, and I think that enabled me to not only meet people but also to understand many of these ideas around the relations between technology, society, art, and science in different ways. So, I organized this festival because I had the contacts to do so.

There weren’t many people working on media art in Peru, so we started to help them and support their works, helping them to produce their work. I was editing a lot of the time, then other people that I supported started to help others too. At that time, still some of the equipment was not as accessible, but that changed quickly throughout the years. We set up a small lab with the support of the Daniel Langlois Foundation in  the early 2000s, when the foundation still existed, a Canadian Montreal-based foundation. They did very interesting work– they had a particular program for non-represented regions, and we were lucky to get support from them. That was something that we did for seven or eight years.

As the festival became bigger, there was a small organization in Peru led by Mauricio Delfin and two other people, who took over the festival. They did things in Puerto Maldonado, in the Amazon, in Arequipa, in the South, and in the North. I was involved in some of these activities, and this also enabled us to think about how we can really engage with these communities– and this is still an open question in many ways. It’s not just about showing film projections, or facilitating the technology, but also about how we can understand the complex taxonomies of the languages and the ways of thinking, because, through oral tradition, you build knowledge.

Jorge Villacorta and I, thanks in particular to Tom van Vliet from the World Wide Video Festival, and some support from Hivos, were able to do a mapping of what was going on in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. We thus decided to work on something around Peru, while conducting research around what was going on in those areas. This helped us to work on a larger project that was supported by the Spanish Corporation Agency, which was the first time that there was a screening program that included all countries in Latin America. Usually, when films, video and media art were brought from Latin America, it was mostly from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico; and sometimes Chile, Peru, or Colombia. We really wanted to show the work of all of Latin America.

With the support of the Spanish Cooperation Agency,   we decided to extend our training program beyond art and technology. We wanted to see what’s going on around technology, society, innovation, and culture in Latin America, mostly focusing on Central America, which was a ‘terra incognita’ for many of us–the Andean region. Along with other projects, such as Isulares Divergentes, we were prompted to focus on the non-represented of the non-represented. If Latin America is considered non-represented, why don’t we think about the non-represented of the non-represented? This is how we started Escuelab, calling around the Andean and Central American regions.

You mentioned a lot of Dutch references, like van Vliet, the Worldwide Video Festival, Hivos, Prince Claus. Is that a coincidence that you just ended up with those connections, or is the Netherlands an active country?

I don’t think it is as it was before. Their strategies and their cooperation have changed dramatically. There was a dramatic change as Peru was no longer an extremely poor country. Cooperation agencies usually drive most of their efforts in the poorest countries, so, when we were excluded from that list, cooperation changed. Peru is definitely a rich country, but in terms of culture, it’s deprived of many things. For the Netherlands, I would say that the policies that were supported directly through cooperations, institutions and foundations, for instance Prince Claus, Hivos, Impakt, or through partners in the Worldwide Video Festival, were very important. They were fundamental. We also had a lot of relations with the Spanish Cooperation Agency, but for them this was something new. Fortunately I can say that, since we already had experience with the Daniel Langlois Foundation and with other organizations, we were relatively experienced in dealing with international cooperation.

So we organized Escuelab. Through Escuelab, we had residencies for two years, but we also set up many things that we are proud of. For instance, the first Fab Lab in Latin America, which was a project that Escuelab seeded, but ultimately became a project of its own. The team that Escuelab chose to set up that Fab Lab helped to create 35 Fab Labs, not just in Latin America, but in other countries. I feel extremely proud of that.

It is clear you have been pioneering, but there are other younger generations doing things differently. How do you see ATA in a current medium-art landscape? 

That has always been a challenge. So, when Escuelab came to an end, we tried to push it as much as we could. In a way, we went bankrupt after that, because all our savings and finances from ATA went into Escuelab until there was nothing left. But we truly believed in the project, even though it became impossible to sustain. At that point, we realized we needed a more linear structure, more like an office, a project-based office, where our curatorial practice could help make certain projects visible abroad, while also allowing us to start new research initiatives.

So, it evolved into something like a project-based office. But beyond that, because we had a collection of films that we used to screen, we also became somewhat responsible for the audiovisual heritage of experimental art in Peru.

Besides your collection of films, you also have a book that played an important role in your work with ATA. Could you elaborate on that?

Well, this is a personal endeavor, but it’s very much connected to ATA. Rafael Hastings was a pioneer in audiovisual arts in the 1970s. He was the first artist we presented in the festival in 1998. He once told me that he had made a film, and the interesting thing about Hastings is that he worked with video using chroma key, switchers, and other technical effects from the 1970s. But he also worked with Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm film. So, he went through all the technical processes of that time, which was a period of major technological change. We don’t often realize it today, but back then there were many formats coexisting. People who wanted to film their families used Super 8. Others, more professional filmmakers, used 35mm. Many were even reluctant to use video at first. So, Hastings made a 35mm film, and it was lost. It was lost for fifty years. I searched for it for a very long time, and finally I found it at the Spanish Cinematheque.

I found both the raw footage and the final edited version. By that time, Rafael Hastings had already passed away, so I worked closely with his widow and his family. Before he died, he had given me a book, a book that contained another book inside it, a film diary filled with watercolor paintings of landscapes. The film itself, in a way, relates to ideas we can still reflect on today, about how to connect with the pre-Columbian past, which is very present and, in many ways, very heavy in this country. And that’s not necessarily something positive. In this case, the film also connects with Asian, Vedic traditions, a very unusual combination for that time. When we finally recovered the film, we worked on its colorization, using the film diary as a guide, not exaggerating, but remaining very respectful. We also collaborated with the original musician, who is still alive and was a close friend of Rafael Hastings.

This project is very much connected to one of the main aspects of our current work: preservation. But we don’t preserve simply to safeguard the past as cultural heritage. We try to understand how these films and materials still resonate today, how we can read them now, and what meanings they carry in the present. I think that’s one of the central parts of our practice.

So, you talked about Escuelab. There is another fan of Escuelab at Buen-TEK: your resident artist, Jimmy Carrillo. He went there and it was also very important for him. Why did you choose Jimmy as your resident artist? 

It’s interesting, because we were discussing who to choose, and I think it’s very important that we decided not to select an artist, but someone trained in journalism. Some years ago, for the Sydney Biennale, we organized a project at ATA around the theme of rivers. We invited many people, scientists, artists, to share their perspectives. I was really surprised by one of them, who was a journalist. Journalists, of course, do a lot of fieldwork, but today many of them are, in a way, multimedia journalists. Another great thing about journalists is that they have to work as part of a team. Of course, everyone needs to collaborate today, but I think journalists understand this much better, they know they are not the sole creators of the world.

In this case, he was joined by a technical expert, Elvis, and a musician, an experimental musician we had also worked with before. It was a very nice combination. We felt that it opened up the space to people who don’t necessarily come from a traditionally artistic background. And I think that was very important.

The project that Jimmy is doing, territory, sound and shared memory, wants to make us experience climate change by the sounds that maybe no longer exist, have disappeared or have become more or less frequent. What, in your experience, would this project need to generate in Peru and the local context to make it a success? 

When we lose a language, it’s not just that we lose a language but also lots of other elements around knowledge. But that’s also connected to climate change  because if we lose a way to cultivate certain crops, those crops are no longer cultivated, and that is also an impact, in one way or another. So there is a connection between language loss and climate change. What is also important is that many of these works, due to their technical complexity and multimedia character, are usually produced in the Amazon before being exported to the Netherlands and Lima, Peru. The fundamental question is how we can return this work to the community in a meaningful way, not merely by exhibiting it there. We must seek fair and reciprocal forms of exchange, not out of obligation, but in recognition of the ways the community generates knowledge and intelligence through the work itself.

One of the artists we work with, Francesco Mariotti, is a kind of hybrid figure. He was born in Bern, Switzerland, in the Ticino region. In the late 1960s, he created some of the most remarkable works, possibly among the most outstanding pieces shown at Documenta. Later, he produced another work for São Paulo, all of these being highly aesthetic and experimental projects. His father was living in Peru, and Francesco himself spent around ten years there, in Cusco, near the jungle. During that time, he was deeply influenced by other forms of knowledge he encountered. Later, he returned to Locarno, where he worked at the legendary Video Art Festival of Locarno, directed by Rinaldo Vianda. This was a place where people came together not only to discuss art and technology, but also the broader relationship between technology and society. My point is that Mariotti embraced ideas related to artificial intelligence, but he did so through Amazonian references. Interestingly, what he was exploring already resonates with what we now call artificial intelligence. Yet he also understood that AI, in many ways, is a system that standardizes knowledge–a mechanism for standardizing technical protocols to make certain services function. But the truth is, there is not just one artificial intelligence in the world; there are many forms of artificial intelligence.

We need to recognize that many communities in the Amazon, and in other parts of the world, have their own kinds of artificial intelligence. To ensure a fair and meaningful use of AI, it’s not enough to build frameworks like the AI Act or other Western-driven models. We must also embrace new forms of holistic knowledge, where there is always a connection between the land, the space people inhabit, and their language. These are some of the reasons why we find this project so exciting. We look forward to the many different outcomes it may generate, not just one. And we should not measure its success simply by how many people visit the project, but by how it helps us develop new ways of approaching cultural heritage, ways that recognize more complex, taxonomical, notational, and cognitive dimensions.