"I found a power in being the terror of the people"

Catalan version

Spanish version

 

Oh no, Wynnie, not again. After devouring their own abortion, sewing their vagina, removing their Adam's rib and turning their hiv positive into "The sweet nectar of your blood", the Peruvian artist embraces their terrorist and bombarding vocation. They have hung themself from the ceiling of Mayoral in a position of a cross of the way to guide migrant destinies and dissidents marked by stigma. Their mother believes that it is because they did not have money to baptize them; since then she has prayed for them. Wynnie Mynerva paints and moves, and this runs in their family like the cross she blasphemes from. In the seventies their parents left the Andes and migrated to Lima, invading its sandbanks and building houses of matting. In Peru, occupations are called invasions. In a few days, Wynnie's family and the rest of the invaders went from a handful to 25 thousand; they multiplied like viruses. They named it Villa El Salvador and today it is a city of almost half a million people built on the same lands devastated by colonial violence, thanks to the ayllu and community organization. With that same expansive and diasporic impetus, Wynnie Mynerva has been moving for some time through fortress Europe. Now they are  in Spain, but they have brought here the sand from their desert of origin. With this new body, hiv wants to infect the system that makes them sick and blames them. That is why they have crucified themself at the age of 33. At Christ’s age, they are the body and the virus, the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in them, even if they are dead, will live.

 

Yes. I was studying at the state school of Fine Arts and every day I went from my house, in Villa El Salvador, to the centre of Lima. Around that time, to earn money, I began to sell my paintings in front of the National Library. I sold still lifes, self-portraits, copies of famous painters. I sold them for 50 soles. It was the first art market I knew: on the pavement.

 

Years ago, my father had forced me to study a "more" serious career, so I spent three years studying Art History. What did I learn? To understand art in its context, but, above all, to see it as a thermometer of each era. To be interested in trying to read what was behind art and wanting to know everything about its processes. And how interesting it was to discover not only what was in the painting, but also what wasn’t painted in it. I was interested in the absences. For example, the absence of women artists. And how much that had to do with the fact that female bodies were always painted as languid bodies without desire.

 

 

Sometimes it seems that in Lima there’s only one way to get on the art circuit: studying in private schools, living in the most expensive districts or having a family of collectors. I was studying in a state school, and it was like being in a black hole. I never made it to the openings, there was no way I could stay to meet people from the circuit because I missed the bus to return home. But I had other advantages: for example, I studied next to the Central Market. From there you see things that you don't see in Miraflores: the working force of all the marginalized neighbourhoods that push, with their vitality, the city. In those years I also began to ask myself what it meant to be an artist and what it was to be an art worker.

 

At the time I didn't see it, but Villa El Salvador represents the strength from which I come, the one that’s brought me here. My parents migrated when they were children, both from Huaraz, in the central highlands. My mum, Blanca Ortiz, arrived alone in Lima when she was 14 years old. She ran away from home at a very young age. She didn't know how to speak Spanish, she only spoke Quechua, and so, while still a child, she began to clean the houses of wealthy people. My dad, Antonio Mendoza, has a similar story. He arrived younger, at nine years old. His mother had died. He came to look for one of his brothers who lived in Lima, and, in his search, he began to clean cars to earn a living. They met a few years later. I’m always surprised by the strength they had to migrate so young. Not knowing the codes of such a tumultuous capital, they built their house in the middle of the desert. Villa, at that time, was just a sandy area on which people, little by little, built their homes with matting. We came from nothing and built everything. And I was happy there. Maybe because my mum never promised me luxuries; she didn't show me anything other than exactly what was there. We slowly built our house: first of matting, then of wood, and recently we put in some cement. Villa El Salvador taught me how to grow a plant in quicksand. That's why I sometimes feel that, for me, there are very few impossible things.

 

I’m moved by our history, that history of migrants that comes from a long time ago and continues today. Now, my mum has come to Spain with me and she is looking to stay, work and regularize her situation. My mum's strength pushes me.

The first time I left Lima, I went to the United States. I didn't speak English. "How am I going to manage?" I said. And then I remembered that my mother migrated to Lima not speaking Spanish, without knowing how to write. "I'll do something," I said. "I'll do something; I'll use signs to speak." And I did something: I managed to exhibit at the New Museum. I pat myself on the back for my effort.

All the women in my family, except me, have been domestic workers. That story of migrant women has pushed me to where I am. I think that the effort and achievements have always been collective, and I try to work as hard as they did to open the way for those who will come in the future.

 

As a child, my sister's godfather, who was also my neighbour, had a fondness for painting. He was a gay man, very independent, who used to talk about art with me. He said that his hobby was painting, although I don't remember seeing any of his paintings. I think he bought art supplies in case one day he did. I cleaned his house for work and then we stayed talking. We watched movies, talked about adult things. I remember that, in his living room, on a shelf, there was a sealed box of oil paints, like just another ornament. I became obsessed about that little box. I dreamed of those oil paints. The days I went to his home, I checked it, to see if he’d already opened it so I could sniff the colours that came out of the tubes. Several years passed like this, and I never saw inside it. Then I stopped going to his house. I think that image sowed my obsession with oil painting. When I became a painter, that expectation to see the colour of the tubes inside, to test them, stayed with me.

I also remember that, as a child, I won school competitions painting on cards. My ego as a child painter grew stronger over the years and, since my parents allowed me to spend long periods alone in my room and didn’t force me to socialize with other children, I associated the exercise of painting with spending time thinking alone.

 

The lack of everything, the absence of the State, that disorganization, can be a renewing energy. I remember the diversity of trades within my closest group of friends in Villa El Salvador: many were fine arts artists, drag queens; some were engaged in sex work, others were poets, others did cultural management. Together we could go to marches, parties or get together in the middle of the pandemic to think about how to intervene in the public space. Of course, most of the time, we didn't intervene at all. The lady who passed by selling stuffed potatoes intervened more in the public space than we did, because people needed her intervention. I feel that during the pandemic I came up with the most daring ideas. There was no rule on how to do things. We were ten or fifteen people gathered in my studio while the world was in the process of being destroyed, and there, locked up, we thought about how we felt about our gender and our appearance. It was like an emergency workshop on our dissident bodies. Life could end very soon, so there were no more priorities or distractions. In those meetings, two of the recurring themes were the interest we had in modifying our bodies and the desire for sexual reassignment.

 

At that moment, like my friends, I also wondered who I was. It was a breaking point. I knew it was a conversation I was dealing with in "Sex Machine" and "The Garden of Earthly Delights." In those exhibitions, and for years, I‘d been trying to reconcile myself with the biological category of "being a woman". But along the way I discovered that this anguish didn’t end, that it wasn’t just about changing a model of thought, but about modelling my body. I was born a "biological woman", but there were many things that I didn’t agree with: I didn't want to have children; the idea of being penetrated vaginally had always caused me anguish. There are many family stories that I can imagine as triggers for that anguish. I especially remember that, in some stories about my family genealogy, women were raped without this being at all surprising. That's why for me, for a long time, being a woman was synonymous with a body that was inevitably going to be humiliated. I didn't want to be. My problem didn’t arise from denying my desire to desire on the female spectrum, but from making my way and constructing what shape my body should have to experience that desire. The friends I had in those years confirmed what I was looking for: trans friends, non-binary friends, lesbians, gender degenerate...

  

It was at that moment that I decided to operate on my vagina and suture three-quarters of its opening, to make it tailored to my needs. The closest support group I had never questioned whether this was right or wrong. We truly believed in our freedoms and applauded making use of them. Everyone agreed that it was my body and that I decided. It never occurred to me that it was weird; the problem was how to make this happen. I fondly remember that, at first, I told it as a joke, but little by little it made sense until it became serious.

 

"I'm going to sew my vagina sewn up," was the most logical and simple answer. I didn't want to have vaginal sex anymore and I've never had an ounce of maternal instinct. Initially, when I had the surgery, not much changed. I was relieved that I’d done it, that I’d modified my body in that way, but over time the real and ironic changes came. My femininity began to surface: I was more comfortable with what is stereotypically feminine—wearing a skirt, putting on makeup, having long nails. I started to like the idea of experimenting creatively from there, but only after I closed my vagina, because I was no longer going to be defined by what went in or out of it. Neither because of its vulnerability, nor because of the fear of being forced. Then I gave free rein to that femininity, because I didn't have all the elements that being a woman implies, at least two that distressed me: being penetrated and giving birth.

  

A doctor and I made it up. I made some freehand drawings, suggesting different possibilities of its visuality, and together with the doctor we adapted it. At that time my partner was a trans woman and the doctor asked me to go to the clinic with her so that my partner could give her consent. We had to pretend to be a heterosexual couple. I asked my girlfriend if she could help me with that and she kindly agreed. She told the doctor that she was my boyfriend and that, in the future, we didn't want to have a baby. The doctor made us sign a paper saying we didn't want to be parents. A document invented by him to protect his professional ethics. For 500 soles more, he agreed to let my girlfriend film the surgery. I think that I could only imagine something like this happening in Peru. He was the fifth doctor I consulted; the previous four thought I was a little crazy, since, as a sexual reassignment, they only contemplated vaginoplasty and phalloplasty.

 

Recently, in Amsterdam, I tried to extract some blood to place on a glass sculpture. I tried my best, but no doctor agreed to draw my blood for artistic purposes. I feel that there are things from that wasteland, from those confusing laws on the other side of the sea, that push the future.

  

I feel that art has to go through life, change it, make it explode and redesign it. We need people changing the course of the meaning of things. When I modify my body, it not only changes my body, but also its meanings. One day, someone got tired of feeling abused because, in each penetration, I felt that I was living a scenario of abuse and I thought that it was my destiny as a woman. I learned to create art with that anger and unease, but, if all that knowledge I acquired and all that research were just hanging on the walls of a collector, a gallery or a museum, what was the point of having gone through all that in my life? Not all my works are body modifications. My work is composed of paintings, sculptures, drawings. There are many installations and, lately, video. For me, the theory is in these elements that we consider visual or plastic arts, and they are the body modifications or performance that brings art into practice.

  

Fried chicken (laughs), fatty, like liver. I did it to reverse the feeling I felt when I had my first abortion, when I felt an immense sense of guilt and denial for my own body. This second time I wanted to do it differently. I wanted to heal that wounded memory. I wanted it to be a process in which those remains of my body didn’t disappear down the toilet, like when a murderer disappears the remains of his victim. I wanted to start a therapeutic process, for those remains to become one with me again.

 

I remember a little dog I had as a child, which tried to eat its dead puppies. I came across a scientific text which said that the placentas of mammals have opioid, analgesic effects that relieve pain, so I decided that I was going to eat those remains to relieve my own pain.

Everything has its share of humour; otherwise, it would be too tragic. People are having a hard time; if you don't laugh a little, you wouldn't be able to stand the discomforts of life. Even if the body has experienced frustrating processes, laughter is our final victory. The biological body is a trap, a prison, so cut yourself, remove and add things. Use surgeons creatively, not just to satisfy the normative desires of heterosexual doctors.

  

For me, being an hiv+ body isn’t a loss. What's more, my pictorial cycle on this condition seeks to destigmatize the medical imaginary of misfortune historicized after this virus. The disease is a complex issue, so I'll tell you how this reflection began in me... I’d just ended my relationship with that trans woman I was with for four years. We were sexually free; we didn't even have to say who we were with. I really liked to see and meet people through sex for my artistic projects, discovering the body through experience, using the body, sex, as a space for research. But I was very serious about love. Then I discovered that my girlfriend was cheating on me with a mutual friend. It broke my heart. And out of spite I started dating people like crazy, not even to have sex. I just met them, I didn't even like them and I told them: "I don't want anything". And in those days, I met a guy who lay down with me on the bed. An x. I didn't feel like sex, I was bored with life. He tried to penetrate me anally, but very subtly, and I said, "Go away," and he left. And in that minimal, mediocre, desireless experience, I contracted it. I wish it had been in an orgy with ten people. [As Rubén Blades sings in the song “Pedro Navaja”] La vida te da sorpresas, sorpresas te da la vida... (Life gives you surprises; surprises are what life gives you...).

I was scared. I saw my life go by. I felt guilty. Although I soon understood that I only needed to take constant medication, I kept thinking about why it had happened to me, thinking that life was making me pay for all my freedoms. All the Christian guilt I had hidden away came out. To have hiv is to be sick with meanings, infected with metaphors that society projects on a body; that’s when I understood it. I also felt again, this time in another aspect of my life, how the system tries to crush you with shame, guilt, and silence.

  

I took to thinking about and painting the universe; that’s why it’s an eminently blue exhibition, in the same way as this one is brown like the sand of Villa El Salvador. In Rome I drew circles on the ceilings and, within the circles, bodies in which human organs and viruses can be seen like flashing stars. I imagined them as oracles in which you can ask about the future. You can see the paths of the viruses, how they form constellations; they are an ecosystem in themselves within human bodies. It's a very mystical series. I modelled glass vessels and introduced my blood into them. I think that the fright, the feeling of having an experience that I thought was close to death, led me to paint myself in communion with the universe, to think that I was part of something bigger than this virus that sheltered in my body. And that viruses could be beautiful, that there’s a certain beauty in being sick. That's why there's so much colour. I understood that, although something micro was happening to me, there was also something macro. I became very, very small to understand the interwoven networks that contained me.

  

I think the question is why some issues are still provocative. In "Presagio", as I mentioned, I introduced my blood into my glass sculptures. I liked the idea that objects were, in some way, dangerous, like the disease; that they had that beautiful component, but at the same time fragile, with the (false) idea that, if they broke, they could contaminate you with my infectious blood. I needed to share the fear: that of infecting or being infected. They were the treasures of the exhibition room; they were viruses in the form of plants, in the form of bones and animals.

  

Obviously, it loses its virulent power every minute. It's a game, a dangerous game. There’s a book by Susan Sontag in which she talks about the disease as a ghost. It’s what you want, for which you feel morbid, but at the same time, what you’re afraid to look at. And that happens with people with hiv: many have this anguish about having contracted it, but they don’t want to get tested because they’re afraid to know it. Not detecting this condition early can cause many deaths.

 

I thought about the patient's perspective. In giving them the power of their own intervention in the world. A whole system of meanings has been created from the disease like being a victim of an attack: you can beat cancer, you can face it. These are military qualities that in the end are directed against your own body, which entail its destruction. You can't fight the virus because the virus is already you. The virus is me. We are one. It's an extension of my body.

  

My viral load is undetectable, which means I don't transmit the virus. Thanks to AHF, an organization specialized in providing information and treatment about hiv in several countries around the world, I have access to adequate treatment, but I know that in Peru and in many Latin American countries the shortage of retrovirals is a reality. I don't know what would happen to me if I went back. I have to find a way to have residency in Europe; I need to marry someone (laughs).

 

Yes, we’re looking for a husband for my mother, for me, for everyone. Get married, please. Long live the family!

 

In the previous one it was a look into the unknown. When we look at the sky, we don't know everything and we feel so small. When we look up we seek a much bigger explanation, something that people have called God, the Universe, Energy, or whatever you want. The process began being very mystical, in the search for the meaning that was missing from my life. In "My Body as a Weapon", on the other hand, I decided to stretch the fabrics as if they were meat. The gallery has two floors; those two floors were my body, so I stretched the canvases as if they were my skin and painted them, showing the viewer my organs. Then I built a sculpture that went through the two floors: it was like my skeleton transforming. And if my body is the gallery, those who enter the gallery – the audience – are the viruses, the invaders. I was interested in the game of whether I’m the one who infects them or if they’re the ones who infect me.

 

This exhibition unleashes the need to be in community, with a beautiful emotional contribution from the people I esteem and love. And I’d like to take this question to mention that, in this project, I haven’t been alone. I’ve been supported by my friends and family. All parts of this project have been done in loving collaboration. This result has been the product of my effort together with that of Alexis Lima, Makabre, Manuel Guevara, Blanca Ortiz, Hija de la Coca, Luanna, Chris Luza, Nikki, Michi de Pichi, Anhedonia, Cynthia Mendoza, La Pinki and Antonio Mendoza. I hope I don't forget anyone who showed me affection. This project unleashes the embrace of all of them. So, as an excuse for this project, I was telling them, one by one, what had been happening to me with respect to my condition, and of course I started with my mother. I was also weaving my story together with each one of them. I mean that many of the talented people mentioned are from the same place I describe in my project, Villa El Salvador, while some others also come from different margins.

  

Firstly, there is Christian guilt, damn it. The first thought that came to my mind when I learned about my condition was to feel that God was punishing me. My body was now a space of Christian terror. As the days went by after the detection of hiv, the clinical symptoms never arrived, nothing hurt at all, I had no adverse reactions from the pills. They performed several tests to check my state of health and I didn’t feel that I was inside a sick body. That's why hiv is, dramatically, a social disease, because you're sick with the meanings that people project onto your body. It’s the eyes that observe you that infect you with guilt and punish your sexuality. The second great moment was to try to attack the Catholic god. If God was picking on me, if He appeared to me omnipotent and punishing, I was going to answer Him too. Then I decided to infect his sacred image with my earthly blood, to infect the punishers so that they lose that terrifying purity with which they raise their solemn images. That's what I wanted to do. I like to play with religious images because I feel that, through play, we’re decontracting them.

 

There’s a tradition in various locations in Spain that celebrates "the holy blood of Christ,"the exacerbation of worshipping Christ pure and free from sin, the saviour of the impure. His blood is the complete opposite of hiv blood, which is seen as the blood of the promiscuous, contaminated and lethal. This exhibition speaks of the most holy blood of an infected body, by which we are horrified. hiv blood is the driver of death. In my previous representations, hiv didn’t have an identity, a memory. First, I talked about the emotional process of shock; then, about what it meant to be an invader, which is the only version that some people wanted to have of us: people with a diagnosis and a treatment. They reduced us to medical language. But my works didn't say anything else about what happens to the body in the future. When a body becomes infected with hiv, what else does it infect? It's a question I asked myself when I was in Spain.

 

When they proposed holding the exhibition in this country, they’re obviously touching home, because I’m Peruvian, a migrant from a former Spanish colony. And because I miss the place I come from, and I’m a person treated as infectious, I wanted to represent those cultural codes that had also been infected. Because of my mother, the first things that came to my mind were religious images. So, I set out to infect the Catholic images of Villa El Salvador, the place where I grew up. My mother is someone who is extremely conservative, Catholic; every day I almost kill her with a heart attack. At first, I had to make my presentations in code, talk about chronic disease so that she wouldn’t notice. Now she knows. 

She is a trans artist and performer friend, one of my sisters from Villa El Salvador, who’s been living here in Barcelona for two months. I’ve learned a lot from her ingenuity and creativity. What motivated me to invite her to participate in this performance was a very significant episode for both of us: eight months after receiving confirmation of my diagnosis, Alexis —still unaware of my condition— called me one day, crying and terrified, to tell me that she’d just been diagnosed with a chronic disease like mine. "Don't suffer so much," I told her, and I explained to her what was happening to me. I tried to calm her down, I told her about my experience, my reflections, and when I noticed the relief in her voice after listening to me, I encouraged her not to stop imagining herself in the future, always in all circumstances.

 

We don’t crucify ourselves because we’re not Christ. We are Cruzes del Camino (Crosses of the Way), an image born from the resistance of Andean religiosity against the imposition of the Catholic faith. We hung from the ceiling in a position of a cross, without a mouth, without eyes, without a nose. While researching what elements of the Catholic religion I wanted to infect with hiv, looking for local symbols that resonated with this vision of the present, I found the crosses on roads. We hung ourselves there so that the marginalized neighbour who has hiv recognizes this element, because it comes from within her community, and doesn’t get lost on the road. The Crosses of the Way don’t have the body of Christ on them. They arose in the period of extirpation of idolatries, when the Spaniards tried to erase Andean beliefs. The apachetas– the warnings for the walker in pre-Columbian times –had crosses placed on them. We commissioned workshops in Villa El Salvador to embroider the phrase "Cruces Migrantes" ("Migrant Crosses”), the name of the exhibition and the dates on which we discovered our condition. Because the crosses guide the walker, they protect migrants. We want to be those crosses that accompany the journey. No one has been crucified or had to die for it. We were, for each other, that cross on the long road of illness. This representation of hiv is that of a body that lives in Villa El Salvador, that reaches the future, that reaches 80 years old and is still there, in its neighbourhood, in its territory. Talking about hiv with identity, vitality and future. That's why we are crosses covered in sand...

  

Yes, the desert, the nostalgia of having grown up in a sandy place.

 

Life moves faster than art. Life is hot on our heels.

 

Collective experience is a constant in my work. Bodies are a mass of flesh. You may think that experiences are contained in only one person, but they’re something much broader. That’s why I paint a collective: bodies that are built together, that exist in desire. In these pictures I’m saying that we have hiv, but we want to continue living in community, desiring, being desired. What is the desire of an hiv-positive person like? When I found out about my diagnosis, my libido completely plummeted, I felt blocked. Through my paintings I have once again represented myself as a desirable body, but it’s a difficult process.

 

Donna Haraway has a very nice metaphor to describe how the virus enters the body. It doesn’t attack, she says, but rather it’s the body that prostrates itself to receive it. There has to be an intention on the part of the body to carry the virus, to take its hand and reach it. It’s not that the virus bursts in to corrupt everything, but that the body organizes itself around it. It’s not an arrow that pierces you out of nowhere; it’s a chain of events, of life passing beyond our will. Paul Preciado also draws a parallel between the immune system and migration policies that interests me. He speaks of the pure, intact, own national body, and of the migrant as an invader, that external element, the virus that contaminates the national. And then this whole operation arises to seek the cure for the disease that keeps us expectant. But I don't expect a cure. The best day of my life won’t be the day I’m told that there’s a cure for hiv/aids. My life doesn't exist thanks to the promise of a cure. It exists now, with all the concepts that entered me along with the virus. And even if the cure existed, the stigma—what really condemns people to die—wouldn’t go away. People don't die of hiv; they die of social stigma. And that’s what must be fought. The same thing happens with the stigma of migration.

 

As a child I thought about this desolate space, the sand and a group of inhabitants on a uniform mass of sand. Now I can understand that we were never alone, we lived beneath the remains of the Pachacamac culture. We spent our childhood digging up fragments of huacas, remains of shells, balls of salt with which we could draw. This video started with the idea of becoming an infected goddess of the Pachacamac culture. I prepared a structure in the shape of a truncated pyramid with reeds; reeds are a plant fibre that’s usually used to build fireworks in the form of castles and bulls, they’re commonly used for festivities and are lit at the climax of these celebrations. In the central scene of the video, I’m inside this reed huaca; I carry blood transfusion hoses in my arms, which in turn are connected to the candles that are held in this reed structure. Metaphorically it’s my blood that lights these candles. This goddess/huaca comes out at night to tour the desert and shows the process of her infection as a power and sexual climax. At the climax, this reed structure explodes in pyrotechnics and radiates beauty in its play of light. I thought of presenting a video with music that mixes techno and instrumental sounds such as pututo, drums, laughter and others; the title of the video is No es lo mismo padecerla que bailarla (It is not the same to suffer from it as to dance it).

 

This disease gives me a lot of personal power. I hope that my experience can open up other paths, that someone will come and see my artistic practice and say: "I can continue to push this research here". That makes me want to continue producing art. There's something crucial I understood with the disease: I found power in being people's terror. That terror is also experienced in other areas. If you’re a sexual dissident, you’re the terror of conservatism. If you’re a migrant, you’re the terror of racist people. If you’re sick, you’re terror, because you embody death. If you have hiv, you’re the very image of promiscuity and death. This is how we’re seen in social imaginaries. Even within the dissidents themselves, hiv is the greatest terror. In Lima, my friends call it the BUH, so as not to name it. Worse things may come, but after the stigma of hiv, there’s little left to fear.

 

Yes, and how good to have done it. Because I’m alive and healthy enough to say that it’s not that bad, that they shouldn’t get worked up about it. There’s life and a future beyond this.