Hasta La Ideas

The January 2010 cover of CR was designed and produced by the Urcuhuaranga brothers at Publicidad Viusa, their print shop just outside Lima.

The Urcuhuarangas create posters for Chicha concerts, the popular Peruvian style that mixes indigenous sounds with Colombian and other Latin music (subscribers can read more about the Chicha visual culture here).

In this documentary film, Elliot Urcuhuaranga explains the origins of the Chicha visual language and how his father handed down the secrets of the unique process used to make the posters (and our cover)

We first came to hear of the Chicha style from designer and author Tristan Manco. Readers will remember that Manco helped us with our January 2009 cover which was produced in the style of Lambe Lambe posters in São Paulo, Brazil. Manco had come to hear of this indigenous Peruvian graphic style from the Spanish art collective Equipo Plastico who had seen the work on a recent visit to Lima. He put us in touch with local curator Jules Bay who arranged for the production of our cover.

Unfortunately, no-one from CR got to go out to Peru to oversee things. Instead, we sent Jules the text to appear on the cover which Eliot Urcuhuaranga then drew up on paper by hand in the distinctive Chicha style, using a pencil and a ruler as his sole design tools.

Each typographic element was then cut out and fixed directly on to the screen to make a stencil. A black version of the cover was then printed, copies of which were then cut to make additional stencils in order to run the four fluoro colours used for various elements on the final poster.

Jules then arranged for the finished poster to be scanned and sent us the file for us to print from. Our thanks go to Jules Bay, the Urcuhuaranga brothers and everyone at Publicidad Viusa and to Tristan Manco for their help in making our January cover. More on the January issue here