Sarhua Painted Boards

In Sarhua, a village in the Ayacucho highlands, the custom was to give a newly married couple a tabla - a long painted wooden board for the roof beam of their house - showing the family line in registers from the top down, with the patron saint above and successive generations below, each figure identified and shown with their work and possessions. It is a genealogical document as much as a decoration. When people from Sarhua migrated to Lima in the 1970s the format was adapted to smaller boards for sale, and in the 1980s and 1990s artists from the village used it to record what happened to their community during the internal armed conflict - a series of boards documenting killings and displacement that is now held in museums and was used in the truth commission process. The tradition is recognised as national cultural heritage.

What you actually see

• The genealogical boards - family lines painted in registers on roof beams.
• The house-warming custom - a tabla given to a couple for their new home.
• The documentary series - boards recording the violence of the 1980s and 1990s.
• The adaptation - the format reworked for sale after migration to Lima.

When to go

May to September if travelling to Sarhua itself, which is a long rough journey from Ayacucho. Boards are more easily seen at workshops and museums in Ayacucho and Lima.

Honest expectations

Sarhua is remote, several hours on poor road, with no tourist facilities. Most visitors will see the boards in Ayacucho or Lima rather than the village. The conflict-related work is difficult material and is presented as testimony, not decoration.

Nearby

Ayacucho is the practical base; the Sondondo valley lies south.