Matari 69200
The Matari 69200 project focuses on the political violence suffered during the 1980s in Peru. For that purpose, the artist uses as a medium the videogame and the ATARI 2600, a very popular videogame console in Peru during the same decade. The number “69200” in the title refers to the number of fatalities throughout the war.
The armed conflict was between the Peruvian government and the Shining Path Maoist guerrilla. Thousands of people were murdered and tortured and many others disappeared. The savagery came from a fundamentalist guerrilla and from the police forces who executed an abusive and indiscriminate repression ignoring all citizens’ human rights. The same TV screen that showed images of this war was also used for playing Pac Man and Space Invaders. Matari 69200 conflates these two experiences into a videogame based on episodes of a real war.
