The project offers the first comprehensive study of the artistic and cultural relations between Peru and the GDR. Its point of departure is Peru’s political reorientation under General Velasco Alvarado, whose government, from 1968 onwards, increasingly sought relations with socialist states. Within this context, economic and cultural forms of cooperation with the GDR emerged, including exhibitions and theatrical exchanges. The materials examined thus far demonstrate that culture functioned as far more than a supplementary dimension of diplomatic relations: it operated both as a symbol of international solidarity and as a means of cultural self-representation. Methodologically, the project combines heterogeneous sources in order to reconstruct processes of cultural exchange in their complexity. Theoretically, it links the social distribution of visibility to an understanding of memory as a socially situated practice. Culture is thereby conceived of as a field in which political, economic, and symbolic processes intersect. From this perspective, the project identifies three interrelated dimensions of (in)visibility: discursive, archival, and performative. In doing so, it develops an »aesthetics of memory« that analyses the conditions of visibility and renders established orders newly legible.

Luisa Standop studied Philosophy and Sociology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany and at the University of Granada in Spain (BA), followed by Media Culture and Art Theory at the University of Arts Linz in Austria (MA). From 2016 to 2023, she received a scholarship from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. In 2025, she was a visiting researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Económicas, Políticas y Antropológicas (CISEPA) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) in Lima, supported by a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). From October 2023 to September 2026, she worked as a research associate in the Department of Art and Society at the University of Kassel and at the documenta Institute Kassel. Her research interests include Memory and Museum Studies, aesthetics, visual culture, and the colonial and entangled histories between Latin America and Europe.