Place-making, World-making:
Three Amazonian Artists
Curated by Giuliana Borea
Brus Rubio (b. Loreto, Peru, 1983)
Lives and works in Lima and Paucarquillo.
Brus Rubio is a visual artist and the director of Invisible Amazonia art gallery in Lima. He belongs to the Bora and Uitoto peoples from Loreto in Peru’s northern Amazon, and lives and works in Paucarquillo and Lima, where he migrated in 2009. His work addresses the important issues of the day, including creating an intercultural world, dismantling power relations and the politics of memory with a focus on the rubber exploitation in indigenous lands and the massacre of indigenous people.
Rubio has coined the concept ‘Amazonizar’ (‘to Amazonize’), which the artist defines as: to make his culture prevail without another one consuming it, while at the same time recognise the creativity of others generating a new form of intercultural identity. His aim is to amazonize cities, institutions and people. In doing so, Rubio makes recurrent use of self-representation assuming an active role for the dissemination of Amazonian knowledge and the creation of arenas of intercultural encounter, and therefore, illuminating discussion on cosmopolitanism and world-making.
Rubio’s work is exhibited extensively, including exhibitions in Peru, Brazil, Colombia, US, Switzerland, France, Spain, UK and China. His paintings have entered the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte de Lima and he has participated in Art Lima Fair and at Madrid Contemporary Art Fair ARCO 2019. Rubio’s residencies include Mana Residencies in Miami (2018) and Matadero Art residencies in Madrid (2019), and he has been recipient of the Artist Passport competition supported by the French Embassy in Peru (2011).
This film accompanies Dr Giuliana Borea’s exhibition ‘Place-making, World-making: Three Amazonian Artists’. It is part of her current research project, which you can find out about here: Amazonart project.
