This exhibition brings together for the first time photographs and films created by Carlos Ferrand Zavala some fifty years ago. Ferrand Zavala was born in 1946 in Lima, Peru, and at the age of thirty-three he immigrated to Quebec, where he has spent the past forty years building a career as a filmmaker. The works presented in this exhibition were all made in Peru in the early 1970s, during the brief period when Ferrand Zavala worked as a cinematographer for the socialist military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado. While some were made to promote the government’s agrarian reform, others were personal projects created out of a desire to record and recognize the everyday realities of Peru’s Indigenous peoples. Taken together, these photographs and films represent the young filmmaker’s initial, critical response to the deeply entrenched racism and social inequities of his country of birth, at a time when the promise of social justice was being appealed to, in Peru and elsewhere, as an engine of political discourse. 

Upon returning to Peru in 1970 after studying film at the Institut national d’études cinématographiques in Brussels, Belgium, Ferrand Zavala got a job with the Reforma Agraria and later with the Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a la Movilización Social (SINAMOS), state-funded organizations whose purpose was to raise awareness and popular support for the agrarian reform, a government programme that involved the transferral of vast expanses of land from a few landowners to the mass of agricultural workers – essentially, an attempt to dismantle the feudal system that had remained in place since the colonial period. In 1970, Ferrand Zavala filmed a first documentary short on the takeover of the Casa Grande hacienda, a domain the size of Switzerland that had been owned by the Rockefeller family. And on April 28, 1971, he made a number of photographs of the land that would become Villa El Salvador, a model of self-government and social justice organization. The resulting images, presented as the series Villa El Salvador, capture day one of this historic expropriation in scenes of celebration and the resourceful construction of temporary housing.

That same year, feeling the acute contradiction between this new work and his own privileged background (his family was among the twenty wealthiest in Peru), Ferrand Zavala left home to live in a shantytown located in Chorrillos, on the coast of Lima. For the next two years, he shared a house with the Rojas, an Indigenous family of Quechua descent, to whom he became close and whom he would occasionally photograph as they went about their daily lives. A selection from this body of images, titled La familia Rojas, was made into a photobook by his friend the poet Pablo Vitali, who juxtaposed Ferrand Zavala’s photographs with clippings taken from the country’s major newspapers. The book Occidental y cristiano, intended as a biting critique of the ruling classes’ ignorance of the harsh living conditions of the poor, draws on the absurd contrast between the simplicity of the Rojas’ circumstances and the superficiality of the bourgeois lifestyle.

Ferrand Zavala’s work for SINAMOS and the agrarian reform presented the filmmaker with an opportunity to travel all over the country and to experience first-hand the diversity of its peoples and cultural histories. Many of the films he produced over this period, four of which are included in the exhibition, reflect this awakening to the value of cultural difference – a belief that he would carry with him throughout his career. As visual documents, these films were, in the early 1970s, groundbreaking for their simple depiction of the lives of Black and Indigenous people in Peru, as subjects worthy of representation. Cimarrones, which Ferrand Zavala shot in 1975 and completed in 1982 in Montreal thanks to support from the National Film Board, was – and remains – the only fiction film devoted to the history of Afro-Peruvians. The film, which was based on primary archival research, is composed as a kind of Western in which enslaved Africans are delivered from their oppressors by a band of Cimarrones, or escaped rebels living in freedom. 

For almost fifty years, these photographs and films lay essentially dormant. A number of factors explain this phenomenon: for one, the Velasco government’s ousting came with the wide-reaching repudiation of all that was remotely associated with the revolution. Ferrand Zavala’s exile to Quebec may also have contributed to their neglect, yet for him, it is explained chiefly by the persistence of racist thought, both in Peru and more broadly. In 2011, interest in Ferrand Zavala’s early work was reignited with the inclusion of the book Occidental y cristiano in the anthology The Latin American Photobook, edited by Spanish photography historian Horacio Fernández. As a result, in 2018, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, acquired Ferrand Zavala’s series La familia Rojas and Villa El Salvador (the latter is currently on view in the museum’s permanent collection). There has also been a resurgence of interest in the films, and in particular Cimarrones, which has been shown on a number of recent occasions, including in June 2020 as part of the Month of Afro-Peruvian Culture at El Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (LUM), in Lima, and in January 2021 via the Montreal-based web channel Chaska Films.

This exhibition participates in the re-appreciation and reinterpretation of these works, yet it also seeks to start a conversation about what it means to display such photographs and films today, and here. What are the conditions that have allowed such documents to remain unseen for so long, and how does their contemporary reconsideration change their meaning? How does presenting them here alter the conception of the histories of Quebec photography and film, and how do they relate to the history of the representation of Black and Indigenous people in Quebec? These questions, like Ferrand Zavala’s works, offer an invitation to pursue the discussion.

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Text by curator, Zoë Tousignant

Carlos Ferrand Zavala was born in Lima, Peru. From there to Brussels, Paris and Vermont he spent several years wandering about, with film always at the core of his interests. Québec adopted him in 1980. He has worked for over 50 years as a screenwriter and director and has collaborated as director of photography on many films, both in fiction and documentary. His directed films include Cimarrones, Americano, 13, a ludodrama about Walter Benjamin and Jongué, a nomad’s journey. Through the years, photography has been his constant and private companion. He lives in Montréal with his family.