On the night of October 25th 1994 I opened my second solo exhibition, titled Gloria Evaporada, at the Art School of the faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of the University of San Marcos. Days before I printed and distributed an edition of 400 invitation cards. I didn´t want a mere invitation card so I designed it to be an art object, to function as an autonomous piece of the exhibition. I silkscreened it on cardboard I recycled from shipping boxes of Gloria, a local brand of evaporated canned milk (Gloria, leche evaporada). I named it invitación-objeto.

I handed them to people I wanted to invite to the exhibition and some I pasted on bulletin boards. At that time the university campus has had been occupied by the army for many months. There were check points at the entrance, military patrolling the hallways and plenty of undercover informants looking for activities they consider suspicious. Many students disappeared in San Marcos during that year. For that reason I designed the invitación-objeto, and the whole exhibition, to be cryptic, not making any visual reference they could immediately link to the Cantuta case. Everything was loose clues. I planned this to evade a censorship before the opening and me being arrested.

The SIE (Servicio de Inteligencia del Ejército) discovered my plot the morning after the opening, on October 26th. By that time it would have been very enbarrasing for them to close the exhibit. They started to follow me.

FOTO: Sanmarquinos reading an invitación-objeto on a bulletin board. Background: intervention with cardboard and enamel at the entrance of the exhibition. Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Exhibición “Gloria Evaporada”, 25 de octubre de 1994