To conduct an urban art workshop in a city you don’t reside requires, first of all, a crucial bonding with the participants. This communion must be based on mutual trust: local participants offer their human substrate and knowledge of the city, while the artist-lecturer provides conceptual and practical guidelines to work on. The six-day workshop was aimed to unfold an urban intervention concept to emerge from the crossing of experiences. It was about thinking the city and to produce -conceptually, theoretically- a new experience through what I call "interference" of the ordinary day street flow. Then, if in the course of days the idea was made flesh, and conditions to carry it out were put together, well, we would put it to practice.
And so it happened. The first few days consisted basically of introducing myself as artist, showing fragments of my work through video or photographs, going into the conceptual historical guidelines related to the notion of intervention, and then inviting participants to introduce themselves and share their expectations regarding the workshop.
On day 3, we went back out to give the city "another look", as if one was blind and suddenly recovered their sight, or as if one was a stranger and saw something "for the first time". I call it a restless gaze, or a virgin gaze. This virgin look enabled to see the city as if for the first time, and thus an idea came up, consequently becoming a title: Lima, Public Toilet. Something that being so usual had become invisible, now brought back to sight. The following day, the intervention’s logistics were planned out. One day before the end of the workshop, the urban intervention took place, and on the final day we drew some preliminary conclusions and set up an exhibition displaying the images and documentation of the experience.

Participants
AMANDA HUME
CHRISTIAN FLORES SAAVEDRA
CHRISTRIANS LUNA
NILTON MELGAR CARRIÓN
ALONSO NUÑEZ
ÁGATA ZUMAETA

Production
LOT PERÚ
General coordination
EMILIO GARCÍA WEHBI


Ciudad de Lima, Perú, 2005.