Kike Congrains is a self-taught artist living and working in Lima, Peru. His primary medium is paper in all its various forms, which he uses for analog collage, sculpture or paper toys, in order to give new life to images, giving them a new history and narrative. Creating a satirical, and often hilarious, narrative of a mythical city with all its encompassing mythology has been a longstanding project with Congrains, sparked by his interest in not only how cultures tell stories of their histories, but how those stories then define the cultures themselves. This concept is one he used to examine the history of his home country Peru and its colonized past.
In Colonization, Congrains centers the figure of the explorer Francisco Pizarro, whom he describes as:
“Most well-known for his role in the conquest of Peru and the Incan Empire. A peasant from Spain, [he] was one of the least well-equipped conquerors in history. However, in the name of Christ, he destroyed the powerful Empire of the Incas and bestowed on Spain the richest of possessions. Pizarro also established the city of Lima in Peru, thus opening the way for Spanish culture to dominate South America.
“...Pizarro personifies the greed and heartless inhumanity of the Spanish conquistadors who, in their quest for fame, money and empire, viciously destroyed entire civilizations in the newly discovered lands of the Americas. Pizarro’s place in history is that of the man who destroyed the empire of the Incas and delivered much of the New World into Spanish hands.”
The conflict between the myth of Pizarro the explorer and the reality of Pizarro as a ruthless plunderer is emblematic of the deeper conflict which Congrains is exploring in this collage, whose narrative is the history of Peru. What does it mean for the country if only one narrative is told? Congrains dissects this idea through juxtaposition of the various, contradictory, components of not Peru itself, but the competing narratives of Peru. A cartoon representation of an Inca warrior rests on top of a genuine golden statue representing the same; ancient text describing conquests overlays part of a history textbook detailing the events contemporarily; a group of Christian missionaries seeks to “save” the people of this land, but stands on a mountain of skulls and ignores the poor reaching to them for help. Overlooking it all is a blind Pizarro, while on the far left a woman has turned her back and is slowly walking away.
