This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

Natalia Villañueva Linares /

An Ideological Alternative Path
to the Core

SAIC emerge journal · Natalia Villañueva Linares — An Ideological Alternative Path to the Core

“Estera” Installation by the artist Natalia Villanueva Linares at the Prairie Center of the Arts, Peoria, IL. Artwork made in honor of the Shipibo Conibo community who courageously overcame the devastating 2016 fire in Cantagallo. Photography by Skyler J. Edwards.

Estera is the construction material often used by people migrating from the mountains, the rainforest, or far off villages to the capital city of Lima in Peru. Four walls woven with different types of straw or dried leaves and a roof of tin or blue tarps, together become a place to live. Many people, coming from different regions of my country, would approach the center of the city, occupy portions of surrounding territory and install these small homes, which are barely big enough to fit four people to sleep on the floor.

These small homes carry a historic lineage of courageous people full of different cosmovisions, languages, habits, dances, costumes, and foods. They carry the depth of their culture, each willing to spend years in constant becoming to offer new opportunities to their children or to pursue a personal drive to study and learn what their village or country life could not offer. Growing up in Peru, witnessing a loud migration from the rural areas to the capital, I was brought up in a cultural system of organized discrimitation and racism against Indigenous people. At the time, there were only five prominent neighborhoods in the city, the others did not count, deemed to be too dangerous to explore and connect with.

My French-Peruvian education allowed me to encounter people—teachers and friends—who enhanced my curiosity to dig, discover, and find ways to connect with an ancestral practice of exchanging with one another. I was looking to bring attention to the cultivation of sectarianism. Seeing people being obligated to abandon and lose the practice of their traditions to be accepted in the mainstream city life, one that is bland, homogeneous, and materialistic, drove me to think about working on processes that could support the diversification of cultural richness and to redistribute the beauty and strength a whole country can offer.

In 2009, I returned to my studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in France after my exchange program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Shortly after my return to France, Earl Power Murphy, an elementary education student and recreational rave organizer, and my partner, asked me to purchase a hundred-year-old abandoned church with him located in Peoria, IL.

Coloring the windows of the Hale Memorial Church, 2018. Photography by Skyler J. Edwards

In 2011, we founded the nonprofit organization Yaku. We tried to restore the giant Hale Memorial church, hoping to turn it into a place where we could give space to and provide opportunities for local and international artists located in different continents. We had an eagerness to see this building come back to life. Through exhibitions and residency programs, and strengthening international cultural exchanges through visual arts, we were looking to build a cultural center in the heart of the Midwest. The following year, I moved back to Illinois for art and love.

For more than seven years, Yaku had grown thanks to the volition of its local community members, a group of exceptional, creative-minded people. We have been led by their trust in our common project and their necessity to share their skills. They have given us the opportunity to help us see our city in a new way, through a luminous and hopeful state of mind. Yaku means water in Quechua, a language spoken in the Andes. Yaku’s team created memorable art projects. We have created monumental art installations; we’ve hosted community events such as Small Nomadic Artistic Experiences (SNAX); we have showcased contemporary artmakers; and we’ve created Ukayzine, the first local and international art magazine born in Peoria. Yaku has inspired artists and newer organizations with its vision and ability to make things possible.

Love spring Installation on the Hale Memorial Church made by Yaku Peoria, 2018. Photography by Beth Weimer

Our mission and vision shifted after a feasibility study revealed the restoration of the church would be too costly for our organization. After reflecting on the purpose, we found new ways to continue to work. We are now operating from High Place, a mini mansion located in a historical neighborhood just down the street from the church. It is a home where many events, shows, exhibits, unforgettable parties, experiences in and outdoors, such as critics, performance art, residencies, and more have happened.

Yaku Peoria meeting at High Place, 2017

Heavenworld playing at High Place, 2020. Photography by Earl Power Murphy

Not what you think, installation by Jesse Meredith (on the grass) National Flag USA RGB, by Martin Monchicourt. Both works presented for Terrain Biennial 2019 at High Place.

Our intentions have shifted, adapting to our sensible needs as an organization. In light of this strong divisive climate left by the previous government, the political issues happening beyond these lands, a world leaning toward extreme conservatism, ceaseless consuming economies, and a pervasive, self-centered survival state of mind, our ideal objective is now a tool for connection. We are looking to elevate humanity, support the celebration of difference, and create understanding through encounters.

High Place could be a beginning; extending invitations to art makers, movers, independent curators, alternative spaces to bring already existing exhibitions to our space, presenting the same show in a new setting, a non-urban setting. Our space could be the first of many spaces helping to create a system of itinerant art shows, a form of pollination of contemporary art across the country in places where these forms of art aren't expected to emerge, for an artist to discover how curious and generous an audience can be, for the visitors to experience neverending approaches to art. In its most ideal form, the project would be composed by a group of different locations from Illinois to Oregon or Illinois to Virginia. Another branch would also support international alternative spaces to create a louder effort, a stronger feel for diversity and cultural crosspaths.

SIII.s3 Performance of the project Solutions by Natalia Villanueva Linares at High Place, Photography by Earl Power Murphy

A few years after successfully developing this project, we would organize seminars and conferences in different institutions across South America. A campaign to disseminate interest in the potential of cultural decentralization away from cities and toward their outskirts: where nature reigns, where food comes from, where different languages are spoken and handmade clothing items are worn, where the root of all traditions was born, all of which make up the core of a country. This is how art could attain its brightest idealistic form, how alternative art spaces can change the cultural landscape. Supporting diversification could also engage an international audience, and shine light at a national level on the discovery of its own richness. A simple gesture to heal distance from each other, creating moments to meet and exchange.




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