The parallel Utopia — David Pérez

THE PARALLEL UTOPIA

︎︎︎ Study programme
︎︎︎ Videoclip
︎︎︎ Documentary

︎︎︎ Espacios Revelados website
︎︎︎ Artefactum website

Parallel Utopia is a project about art and radical pedagogy developed in collaboration with local communities in the city of Lima. The project invited a group of students of fine arts and theatre to live for 4 months in an old abandoned patrimonial building with the aim of promoting a collective recovery process of the Colegio Real of the UNMSM.

The development of an Utopian Studies Programme is the excipient to produce a process of re-appropriation where reality and fiction, memory and imagination, desires and needs concur in the creation of a new collective character: a commune of students that takes the premises of the Royal College as its headquarters, and the district of Barrios Altos as its theatre of operations. Therefore, Parallel Utopian is a creative dispositive that revels the history and speculate about the future of the Royal College, a run-down colonial building from sixtieth century.

The creation of a self-managed cultural centre is the formula chosen to materialise a series of artistic actions -exhibitions, performances, installations and cultural activities - that re-signify and recover the Royal College for the community of Barrios Altos.

Through research, artistic interventions and community encounters, Parallel Utopia invites us to think about the past and the future of the Royal College of the UNMSM, connecting its history with the memories, dreams and needs of the local communities.

While revealing the traces of history, the project invites the audience to project images of the future through the possibility of co-inhabiting abandoned spaces.