
Vix is a thirty-something year old Mexican sculptor. He lives in Lima. Before Lima, he lived in Valladolid. He loves women. He also loves kids, and he teaches a series of art workshops for children near his home in Barranco. He is lean. He isn't short, about 5 feet 10 inches. He has brown skin and a mop of brown curls that spill over his forehead and veil his sharp, black gaze. His whole body feels primed with a restless, anxious energy, and when he laughs his voice leaps to an unnatural pitch (think Tom Hulce in
Amadeus).
He is one of the more interesting people I've met in my life.
This isn't going to be a long post about Vix, his life story, his work, his philosophy, whatever. Vix was kind enough to take me and Sergey out for a night in Lima. We drank
Cusqueña beer and ate beef hearts (
anticuchos). We traded conversation about our own hearts, their frailties, their deceptions, their power to contract and to expand, to break and to mend. We went to a local bar, drank
pisco, and called it a night. The end.
Instead, I want to share a simple but intriguing observation. Vix works with what most consider to be trash. Trash is his medium. He walks the streets of Lima in search of junk, debris, and scraps. A piece of a tailpipe. A discarded light bulb. A flat rubber tire. A metal pole. He harvests the excess bits and pieces of daily urban life and turns them into art.
Vix has been working with this medium since his time in Spain. But the work is harder in Lima.
Why? I asked.
In Valladolid, it was easy to come across scraps in the street. People parted easily with what they deemed "junk." Surrounded by cheap and easy access to goods, they left their tailpipes and their tires by the wayside.
But in Lima, people horde their trash. If a car's tailpipe breaks off in the street, chances are another driver will pick it up and keep it for his own repairs. Finding finding raw materials for Vix's art is thus a challenge in this city.
I wonder what would happen if we started judging our civilization by what it throws away?
(For more on Vix, check out his
blog.)