Spanish and comparative literature professor Silvia Spitta first learned of Peruvian war photographer Oscar Medrano after watching a documentary about him a few years ago.
She was gripped by the 2018 film Volver a Ver ("Seeing Again"), which follows Medrano and two other photojournalists as they track down subjects of photographs they took between 1980 and 2000, when the Shining Path, a Maoist guerrilla group that targeted the Peruvian state and civilians, killed approximately 70,000 people—mostly Indigenous inhabitants of remote Andean villages.
The film caught Spitta's attention, she says, partly because of the way that people in the villages reacted after being shown photographs of the massacres that had occurred there.
"Nobody had paid attention to their trauma," says Spitta, the Robert E. Maxwell 1923 Professor of Arts and Sciences. "In the film it was being revived in very painful ways, but on the other hand, it was important that it was being witnessed—that they knew there had been witnesses to their tragedy."
This sense of acknowledgement and remembrance inspired Spitta and Medrano to collaborate on a new, permanent exhibit of his work in his restored family home in the village of Acos Vinchos, in the province of Ayacucho, which was one of the areas hardest hit by the Shining Path. Funded by a Dartmouth Scholarly Innovation and Advancement Award, the Oscar Medrano Archive showcases and preserves his work while serving as a local memorial to the violence that ravaged the area.
"There's a culture of real repression," Spitta says. "Sometimes the photographs are the only evidence we have that something happened."
Just last year, the ultra-conservative mayor of Lima closed the city's only museum dedicated to remembering and discussing the Shining Path violence. Thanks to massive protests, he had to reopen it and it is now exhibiting the photographs Vera Lentz took of a horrendous massacre perpetrated by the military.
"Younger people who came to the opening of the Medrano archive said, 'It's hard to imagine that this horror happened here.' From the end of the violence till today, it's only a quarter of a century, and already the memory has been lost," Spitta says. "So these kinds of things are significant interventions into the public life of the country."
Prior to this new archive, the Ayacucho province had only one memorial of this period, which is located in the region's capital city. The Oscar Medrano Archive, which is about 45 minutes from the city, helps bring visibility to the more remote regions that bore the brunt of the bloodshed. And because Medrana captured not only violence and heartbreak, but also cultural celebrations and milestones of the local people, the photographs honor and offer a glimpse into their daily lives.
The Oscar Medrano Archive is open to all visitors, and Spitta says school and university students will be making trips to learn about the region's history. She is currently focused on finding new sources of funding to keep the archive running for years to come.
"Hopefully, we can continue working like this, village by village, town by town," Spitta says. She adds that ideally Peru would undertake a countrywide memorial project like Germany's Stolpersteine ("Stumbling Stones") initiative, which consists of more than 70,000 plaques across 1,200 cities and towns that remember Holocaust victims outside their last known residence.
"I think we need to do that in Peru, too," Spitta says. "Put on the walls who was killed by the Shining Path or the military in every little town across the Andes."
Peruvian photographer and filmmaker Carlos Ferrand also recently inspired Spitta to develop a remembrance project.
In 1971, Ferrand documented the birth of Villa El Salvador, created by the Peruvian government to deal with the problem of homelessness in the city. The government donated a massive piece of land to the south of Lima, subdivided it into small plots organized into blocks around central squares and gave each person a title to a plot of land. He photographed the arrival of hundreds of people on that first day. In the words of one resident, "they filled the entire space in three months."
What started as a deserted sandy plain with no electricity or water or sewage has grown into a city of nearly half a million people, Peru's fifth largest city—many of whom have no idea that just 50 years ago, their relatives were digging their home foundations in the sand themselves. Fortunately Carlos Ferrand captured these first moments on camera, and Spitta, working with him and the Museum of Memory, set them up exactly in the same space where he had taken them on that first day to remind its residents of their hard work, grit, and determination.
"The photographs are of people carrying straw mats to build their first shelters. In 50 years, they built a city. It was incredible," Spitta says, noting that many residents told her their children hadn't known the extent of their participation until they saw the photos.
"At a time when people in the U.S. and other countries are being evicted, criminalized for trespassing because they're homeless, this offers another option of how to envision citizenship," she says.
