The content my team and I had been gathering was beginning to add up and we soon had a veritable archive of photos, videos, interviews, and information from some of Lima’s biggest and most important museum collections. The start of the week saw us hit the ground running with scripting, sorting through content, editing, and communicating with the Saphi’s broader team like a well-oiled machine.

This wave of productivity came even as not all members of the group were able to be present at every moment. I was feeling ill early in the week, and it seems that the whole team took turns needing some time to hydrate, sleep, and recover from a few very busy weeks. Yet in spite of the limited capacity of our team at any given time, we supported each other and picked up the slack from others when they weren’t feeling the best. It was a sign of how much we had all grown as a team that we could work together even when we weren’t physically together every day.

And the videos started coming together. Our experiences were soon going to be shared with the rest of the world and we were developing a signature type of vlog-style content filled with information and a repeating call to action: engage with heritage in the form of indigenous language, do what you can to protect this heritage by educating yourself and sharing it, and identify organisations like Saphi and the museums we were visiting as part of this process. We invited everyone to join us as we “search for Quechua in the urban jungle!”

I paid a visit to the Museo de Arte de Lima, a place I had studied last summer during my research on Latin American cultural heritage preservation but hadn’t yet had the chance to see for myself. It was a great collection, presented with a gentle-enough curatorial hand, yet one that still made a strong argument about the continuity of pre-Columbian indigenous art throughout Peru’s history. The influence of this art on more recent artists was particularly fascinating, from the interest of nineteenth-century academic painters in pre-Columbian subjects and imagery, to the outright reclaiming of indigenous styles of perspective and form in utopic imaginings of the future at the beginning of the twentieth century. The art historian within me was appreciative of such a visually and intellectually stimulating experience.

I hope that an element of this appreciation for creativity made my production during the week more creative as well. The team and I experimented with new themes and more ambitious projects, developing ideas for our end-of-project showcase in addition to the videos. While this was still a brainstorming phase, we began to conceive of a double-pronged approach to diversifying Saphi’s social media with an instagram takeover series while also soliciting feedback with an in-person event to take place later.

Lima was also a constant character in my life; from my weekend visit to the chic, fun neighborhood of Barranco, which houses the incredible collection at Lima’s Museum of Contemporary Art, to my exploration of all the bookstores near me in Miraflores, the city continued to surprise and delight with its beauty and cultural richness.