ASYour work is quite varied in style, Air and Space especially stands out as being very different stylistically to your other work. Do you consciously set out to use different styles for different work or is it something that has happened as your style has evolved?

PHYes, Air & Space is clearly different. When I moved to the UK in 2007 I experienced a feeling of almost complete disorientation. In short, I was unable to read the landscape. Of course I could recognise a beautiful hill or a grim corner, but there was really no more beyond that that I could grasp, no meaning at all. That’s a very difficult thing for the kind of photography I make. Although I lived in Cuba for two years at the end of the 90’s as a film-making student, I guess I must have been too busy with my studies, because I never reached a kind of state like I did in the UK – two very different islands by the way, but with some culinary shortcomings in common. I also spent a few months in Germany and in France, but I guess these periods were just brief pauses from my projects in Peru.

Here the big and everyday question became what to do. I made some shy attempts but the results where less than satisfactory. Then, looking at some old material I happened across some pictures I had made in the Air & Space museum in Paris in 2005. I got the impression that in these pictures of satellites and rockets there was an old interest that had already appeared in my very early work as a photography student. In the middle of my disorientation, the idea of working in a museum became very appealing and it gave me a sense of security. I tried to contact the Science Museum in London without much luck, and the Air & Space Museum in Paris wanted a large sum of money to let me work there for a whole day with a 5×4 and a tripod – they considered this as a commercial shoot.

In the end everything became like my own spy movie. I made the pictures in very particular situations, but I finally used the material more like a starting point to think about how you build an image, how an image can be manipulated in order to explore a set of interests that go from European avant-garde, East/West 20th century politics, Sci-fi film and literature, to pure science geekness. This was quite liberating, and every time I found the opportunity, like in the Cold War exhibition in the V&A museum, I tried to make pictures. The only thing is that the security in such places is rather annoying, and it’s funny how all these space suits, rockets and space-base models are not protected now because of their top-secret quality but for their potential for commercial exploitation (catalogues, posters, t-shirts, etc.).

Having now spent three years in the UK I’m beginning to feel more aware of the problems that exist in the country, and they are many, finding the small and big cracks that are all around, and I feel more able to read the meaning of the grim corner if you want. So, I’m feeling that I could start making my work here.

ASThere seems to be a consistent thread throughout your work of the frailty and theatricality of human endeavour, is this something you seek in new projects? What do you feel your work as a whole explores?

PHThat theatricality really draws my interest. First of all in a political sense. I understand what you mean by theatricality, but that word could exonerate or dilute the responsibility for how power is managed at any given time. I would rather think about performativity, where there is a hegemonic power pushing a discourse in order to create a meaning (i.e. modernity, progress, identity, etc.), which often bears little resemblance to the real lives of people in society. Pure fakeness in the end, but a fakeness that allows a certain political order to remain untouched season after season.

In one way or another, almost all my work explores an idea of landscape, a political landscape if you want, where the remains of what had bright and shine, the allure of progress, of that fakeness, is the main subject. The objects in my photographs are artificial archaeological remains made by what appears to be an equally artificial modernising project. Peru has many of these places, and in a country with so many ancient remains, these proto-modern ones tend to vanish in silence. Documenting these areas, these sunken spaces, is what I’m trying to do, not in an attempt to memorialise them, but rather as a way of hinting at what might be coming.

ASYou co-founded the artist collective Espacio La Culpable, co-directed the Escusado Gallery and last year founded Toromuerto Press, which produces photographic books. You obviously like co-operative working! What would be your advise to a group wanting to set up something along these lines?

PHI find the co-operative ethos very appealing and I think it is a good solution for a set of problems, but it also has some tricky aspects. Working in a democratic way is very hard when you really try it, and I guess this also shows the extent to which we are not living in a democracy (here and there), because simply voting every x number of years is the biggest joke.

The Escusado Gallery was an idea that my friend and colleague Philippe Gruenberg and I had as a response to a very inane and boring local art scene: a gallery in the toilet of a small bookstore that showed the work of 12 artists over the course of a year. What could work as a gimmick, was actually treated with (a good kind of) seriousness. Each month we covered the city with posters and we had quite a few visitors. It was pure DIY, and in that same spirit we soon after opened Espacio La Culpable, an artist run space and collective that last year, after seven years, closed down its doors. People came and went during those years and many things came out of that. But going to the question, I guess you have to define what your priorities are. If a collective project is just a way of putting a nice thing on your cv, save your time. However, if you think that co-operatively you could produce work that by yourself (i.e. with no money) is almost impossible, or that two or more heads can sometimes think better than one, that by working together you could reach more people, make more noise, and provided that you enjoy arguing, then go ahead. That’s a lesson that you have to learn, ironically, on your own.

Toromuerto press is an independent publishing project run just by one person, me, and after eight years of working in a collective way it feels good just to rely on myself – I can be my very own South American dictator. But after the first two publications I am now preparing one that includes the work of some ex-members of the collective, so as you see, working with people, friends, still has some appeal to me.

ASWho or what is exciting you about photography right now?

PHThe re-printing of some out of print photobooks. I just got Protest Photographs, the book by Chauncey Hare (no relation sadly). It brings together his two old books, Interior America (1977) and This Was Corporate America (1984). The integrity of his work is really astonishing.

I also like the project by Errata Editions, Books on Books, because now you can study great out-of-print photobooks without having a big budget.

A touring show about New Topographics, the 1975 exhibition.

ASCan you point us in the direction of some exciting Peruvian photographers?

PHFlavia Gandolfo, Philippe Gruenberg and Armando Andrade Tudela.