| Spanish version |
Introduction
On entering any exhibition by Wynnie Mynerva, there is always an interstitial space in our desire to move forward, a threshold that attracts us and traps us with its beauty, although with a certain suspicion and mistrust inside us, knowing that the fury, violence or catharsis of the enjoyment is about to begin, from one moment to another. They are not an artist who leaves us indifferent, whether through their brushstrokes charged with fury and desire at the same time, or their objects, in which the mystery and impulse of violence can make our blood flow on cutting ourselves —if we touch these objects—, or in their performative, videographic or live actions, in which the bodily limit, the resistance of our body which we call a temple, appears to be tainted. It is precisely there, in that irreverent potential, in that danger of leaving our comfort zones, that the beauty of the abysmal and of danger lies in wait in Mynerva’s proposals, making it clear for us that the world as it has been built is a space full of oppression, inequality, prejudice and constructions that are not really confined to the historical, scientific, bodily and experiential reality.
In this respect, their entire practice seeks to question tradition in relation to the bodily appearance of human experience and, especially, how the construction of disciplines such as history, science, philosophy and religion, have been based on white, colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal and hegemonic-normative postulates. Wielding difficult experiences to look toward “a future of hope”, the elusive bodies found in their work exist beyond binary terms such as “man and woman” or “sick and healthy”, to accommodate broader conversations and deeper issues, which involve shaking the foundations of the universalist postulates of the Enlightenment and colonial modernity from the present. Mynerva moreover always does so personally, their biographical and personal narrative being intertwined with more general —not universalist— aspects, helped by personal experiences of different forms of violence against their person, for reasons of origin, gender, social condition or sexuality. Their work cannot be understood without an experience from the postulates of what could be called an intersectional cuir trans-feminism, far from biologistic essentialisms and focused on the assumption of various epistemic
charges and their violence exerted on bodies which escape from that established by the rules and, in turn, it is felt in this outside part of them, the potential terrain in which to exert the enunciation and to vindicate it, empower it and boast about it. The impulse of their work is thus moulded by these collective traumas originating personally from the Global South, and how to confront them, applying strategies that go from prostatic techniques, with performative camouflage, new techniques for queer rewriting of myths, or through a speculative fiction that triggers the performative postulates of a queer futurity.
-I-
It is symptomatic that on entering Mayoral, we are invaded by a sensation of assimilation and camouflage of the paintings with the venue itself. It predisposes us to embark on a mythical journey. A story in which the exercises of camouflage and adaptation to the environment have been essential as survival strategies. Wynnie Mynerva knows this well, both from need and from resilience and resistance. And they apply it personally, allowing us to share their story, starting from Porque nada tenemos, lo infectaremos todo (Because we have nothing, we will infect it all) (2025). A large canvas which bends, which is contorted like a body in reverence, or the action of a hand which shows us where to come in on receiving us. This canvas becomes a sculpture-body or, rather, a shapeless architecture-body, to which their brushstrokes refer, since it is part of the beginning of the labyrinth of a story in which blood is at the centre of the narrative and the connection between the different spaces and works. Mynerva takes this living tissue that circulates through our body —formed by liquids and cells— as the centre of their research. Starting from blood, they refer to questions related to the Christian tradition of the purity of blood —thanks to the colonial inquisition—, and at the same time overlap the notion of infection, as a new state of the blood and its social condition, from which to look at the present, both from the colonial legacy and from the corporeal legacy of the non-binary, colonized-migrant body, infected with hiv/aids.
The narrative that Mynerva presents us with on entering the exhibition is that of a double birth. On the one hand, that of the place where they were born: the district of Villa El Salvador, on the outskirts of Lima, which currently has a high population density. Their parents arrived there like so many others, taking the sand of this tablazo as land on which to found a new lineage to protect them and make their lives more flourishing. In this respect, the first invasions of this territory, the first human settlements of Villa El Salvador, date from May 1971, when a group of settlers invaded some thorny land located in Pamplona, in the San Juan de Miraflores district. Following several days of negotiations with the revolutionary government, presided over by the dictator, general Juan Velasco Alvarado, the settlers were relocated to a sandy area located 25 kilometres south of Lima in the Villa María del Triunfo district, at the time called “Pueblo Joven Villa El Salvador”. The new settlements occupied the huge and inhospitable tablazo that was occupied in less than one month by one hundred thousand settlers and, although it was then inhabited in a planned manner —and had urban planning, with areas reserved for housing, schools, health centres, markets, main avenues, etc.—, initially the invasion of this space was mainly thanks to the ductility of reed matting. This matting is an essential part of Peruvian history and goes back to the third millennium BC, the settlers spending months on these small constructions, which it was easy for them to move and transfer if the police or the military of the velascato[3] came to evict them. The reed matting was thus easy to quickly dismantle and used as protection against the cold at night, and thanks to its ductability it could easily be relocated to another part of this large sandy area, with an important history and archaeological context, with pre-Hispanic and huaca settlements nearby.
The beginnings of this “young town” —the name given in Peru to what we would call here a slum or shanty town—, is what can be seen in some of the pictures by the Peruvian photographer Carlos Ferrand, which have been used by Mynerva not only as a documentary source of research, but also as a way of compiling architectural and bodily performativities of vindication through gestures and actions, as a way of “putting the body” for this great painted epic. In it past, present and future go hand in hand, but without a fixed line, without a way of understanding what goes before and what goes after. This destabilizes the time-space orders to create a temporal abyss which helps us to overcome the colonial linear time and western chronologies, and to seek, in this decolonial spiral game, the use of speculative fiction applied to the field of painting. This subverts the narrative of the gender of painting itself —as also occurs in their canvas La invasión (The invasion) (2025), which refers to this subject within the series of works— and offers rewriting from other times and other bodies.
Because we have nothing, we will infect it all (2025) presents us, in a sandy landscape with an extensive plain between mountains and pieces of matting, with a scene in which the naked bodies from a paradise, which do not know sin, wander like The Burghers of Calais in Rodin’s sculpture, with the weight on their backs, ready to sacrifice their lives to save the inhabitants of the city. In Mynerva’s painting, it would be in defence of their survival and destiny. Therefore, on observing Ferrand’s photographs and Mynerva’s canvas at a time when newspapers constantly publish images of Palestinian refugees who are forced to move to Egypt, or to other places, as refugees, expelled from their settlement, we see how they are intertwined in this battle for territory and they recall the expulsion of the citizens of Calais carried out by King Edward III of England in the fourteenth century. In turn, we contemplate the courage of these bodies from Villa El Salvador, which now, instead of crying or dramatizing their situation, seek enjoyment together. Like an orgy of huacas, matting, the sexual positions are moistened with liquids that are spilt, either the urine with which one body takes pleasure on the other, or the vaginal fluid gushing out, as well as saliva and semen, which make this diversity of sexual positions a tribute to the body as a subverted territory of this invasion. Sexual enjoyment in which to give free rein to fantasy, without the notion of sin, or of faith, or of religion imposed by coloniality, or by the grading of the colours of the skin. Here everything is allowed with mutual consent, and although the slogan of Villa El Salvador was “Because we have nothing, we will do it all”, Mynerva subverts and infects this beginning of the story, adding precisely this distance from which to enunciate.
At the edge of the painting, in large scale we observe, almost as part of a mountain range, two figures which appear to watch the scene from afar, as if they had designated that this should occur; as if the figures were moved like puppets in this viral version of the beginning of this settlement that is observed. The artist themself is represented in it, using nails and claws to unearth their other self, their doppelgänger, their twin, friend, sister with infected blood and trans migrant, Alexis Lima. Both are from Villa El Salvador; they grew up together; they both suffered from the fear and violence of the place where they grew up; both, with their courage, succeeded in migrating and changing the history of discovery for that of the conquest: conquering another body that now identifies them as non-binary or trans bodies, and conquering their own blood, now hiv+, which makes them understand their experience as a new phase of the blood and of its social condition, from which to look at the present. This is why these canvases contain stains which —although at first sight appear to be leopard-like— refer to the marks that aids brings to the surface on bodies with what is known as Kaposi’s sarcoma. In the form of skin cancer, caused by hiv/aids, these purple, pink or brown stains appear on external and internal tissues of the body and, because of their cause, carriers suffered from considerable social harassment. Although to a certain extent these situations would appear to have been overcome, it is only Wynnie and Alexis who recognize each other as twin souls, and can understand this new present.
Behind it, the big canvas becomes a domestic space of shelter and defence. This is where the artist has installed their work Estera cobijo / Estera combate (Shelter matting / Combat matting) (2025), recalling the first settlements through this formless architecture with centuries of tradition and experience. The idea of duality between painting and architecture also occurs in the first object that we find: a nest of wires and/or crown of thorns. With this object Mynerva refers to the complex experience, in a situation of permanent uncertainty, of what their home is. At the same time, they shed light on how and in what way the mandates of the Catholic religion interfered with the pleasant existence of many of the ancestral communities, and with that of female, non-binary or trans bodies —on being bodies of sin—, afflicted by the violence of the Judaeo-Christian cis-heteropatriarchy. The installation endorses the demand for a space: Mynerva fills the exhibition area with self-determination, as a place of enunciation from which they want to take ownership of this space, even turning their back on the speculative fictional narrative, where the works take place and the reeds settle to shelter all the violence of this nest that many people have had to suffer on the grounds of their different conditions.
In any case, in this game of twin souls, of splitting and of cells which are cloned or divided, Mynerva offers us, with this big canvas, a scene in which they are divided. It could be them and Alexis, but it is inevitably taken from a still of the final video where the naked artist walks across the dune-shaped sands, and now in Desenterrar la arena (Unearth the sand)(2025) they find bones, ceramic huacos from previous times and animal skeletons, like when they were little and they played at digging things up from the sand. In this search there is also a latent drama, that of the people searching under this sand for the bodies of those who were murdered, violated for political or gender reasons, etc. Two paintings from this series address this issue. On the one hand, Desaparecidos (Disappeared) (2025) which, although it gives shelter to memory and the past —but latent— life of ancestors, also refers to the dead in this land, since they are spaces where human bodies are disappeared. Maybe not only Alexis, but also other loved ones, were important in this journey to unearth. In this abstract landscape with oriental touches, where water gushes and the mountains in infinite browns seek the bones and remains of an ancestral past, family narratives and stories from their mother, Blanca Ortiz, were also important. Mynerva thus again divides themself into another which comes before, who has influenced the stories and the ways of understanding the beginning of this almost lunar landscape. It is in this context of violence and murder in Peru is where the archaic clashes with the violence committed in the present. In a desperate search to find out about these beings who have suffered from terrible violence, being found dead in the sand, the artist moreover refers to this subject in the painting La búsqueda (The search) (2025).
If we now reverse the narrative, because after the calm comes the storm, this is how two volcanic figures emerge in the background, two colossal figures of Wynnie and Alexis, like goddesses in Diosas Pachacámac (Pachacámac Goddesses), 2025. Like goyaesque giants, they are outlined on the canvases which hang from the ceiling to honour the ancestral past. The Pachacámac culture is one of the most important of the local cultures where the famous Temple of the Sun, among others, is located. Following mythology, it would appear that Wynnie and Alexis have violated the rules, and as children or gods of the temple, they recall the earthquake of coloniality and infection on making Pachacámac’s head move and encouraging this emergence by means of an earthly explosion, in which the rocks or sands take shapes of a sarcoma, where the sarcoma takes the form of a map, or where the earth appears to give rise to a new being. This painting portrays the artist themself and Alexis like sibling gods. They seem to be the deities Urpihuachac and Cahuillaca. Although they were important figures linked to fertility and subsistence, —Urpihuachac associated with birds and fish, and Cahuillaca with beauty—, they are now proud of their condition of non-procreation, while they burst into and shape the space of territorial and bodily resistance in a positive manner. Like the construction of our gaze, these erupting mountain-bodies, which were colonized and infected, continue to suffer from the violence produced by colonial epistemic racism, classism and sexism.
-II-
On entering the second chapter of the three episodes into which Mynerva takes us, starting from room-spaces delimited in the crossing, we go up an architectural ramp of the gallery, like a raised dune, as if we were arriving on top of a hill. The artist places us in a scene with the remains of a performance. Playing with the arcades of the gallery’s structure, Mynerva places a large visual barrier behind it, which conceals, like a burladero, the potential imagery and narrativity that enclose the third space. They do this by concealing it with an immense painting, from one side to the other, although on approaching we realize that they are two individual paintings. Two paintings, two doors, two crosses, two bodies which are no longer there. These paintings serve as the background for the performance El dulce néctar de tú sangre (Performance) (The Sweet Nectar of Your Blood [Performance]) (2025). They present two crosses which are glimpsed in their absence, because they do not exist as such, but rather just their trace. The bodies, their extremities, their positions, their ascents and descents produce the effect of the presence of the cross, which emerges from the distance in violet hues. As mentioned, these two paintings serve as the background for the bodies of Alexis and Wynnie in the inaugural performance, but their marks are depicted in the titles forever: on the left, facing it, Cruz del Camino (Alexis) (Cross of the Way [Alexis]) (2025) and on the right, Cruz del Camino (Wynnie) (Cross of the Way [Wynnie]) (2025).
The name that the artist mentions in the title is not random. In Peru, the cruz del camino (Cross of the Way)also has the name cross of the passion or of travellers, since it is an external element that came from the colony, and is placed on the apachetas. Nowadays, they can be located in cities, paths, urban developments which were towns and previously invasions, like Villa El Salvador. They are called the cross of the traveller because of their location, since they provided them with protection and guidance. They are of the passion because they refer to the symbols of the passion of Christ represented in them. They contain various symbols, each with its meaning located on the cross. Although there are many, they have essential elements, such as the moon on the left, the sun on the right, the letters INRI and the rooster at the top, the skull at the bottom and the face of Christ at the centre. Crossing the cross there is a staircase, a lance and wood which presents, at one end, a reference to a sponge soaked in vinegar. The other symbolic elements of the cross are chosen arbitrarily by the person who sculpts the cross, and no two crosses have the same setup. The first crosses were placed by the Spanish on the huacas located around the recently founded city of Lima in the sixteenth century, where the house of Austria reigned. It is not therefore just a symbol close to the artist but rather because of its colonial religious meaning it is taken by Mynerva as a motif of decolonial reversal.
These paintings accompanied the scene as tableaux vivants, like the enduring trace of their actions, like sandy crosses suspended from the ceiling, like wood, transferred and recorded forever on these canvases. In the same way as the blood came out of the hands of Christ, because of the nails with which he was martyred, and from his forehead, from the thorns in his crown, these painted crosses appear in absence, like marks on a shroud. This blasphemous transposition and identification is taken by Mynerva as a form of subverting the past and bringing it to the present, but in their transferral there is no space for the guilt, redemption or punishment —although at times it may appear in works from this series such as Canto Villano (Villain Song) (2025)— of the Catholic religion in the face of identities and carnal pleasure. On the contrary, these paintings are the gateway to a paradise where bodies give free rein to their fantasies. These bodies are assumed into the heavens, not to be beatified, but rather to accompany the levity of the human being in all their pleasures, making their bodies float and expand in an hiv+ libidinal space. In greater detail, we also observe it as a reflection in the small canvas Ascensión (Ascension) (2025), since it would appear, on being located opposite them, that some scenes have been reflected as a mirror in their refraction. The light presence of these bodies, which enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, roam completely among branches of thorns —in reference to the crown of thorns of the passion of Christ, as an important symbol of Christian tradition, representing the suffering and humiliation that Jesus underwent before his death—, together with the potential danger on making the blood burst out, which as well as syringes, refers to the analyses that hiv+ people have to undergo regularly and to the medical protocols that they have to follow.
If we observe these paintings in greater detail, we encounter other iconographies such as the symbol of the Sun, the Incan Inti, transformed into the Cruz del Camino (Wynnie) (Cross of the Way [Wynnie]) (2025) in a rosette that refers to the anus; now converted into an entrance for pleasure and adoration of the profane delights on this altar to the solar anus. Together with penetrations of all the orifices possible, ejaculations of liquids, dermal contacts between skins with slippery sweat and saliva, onanistic pleasures, etc. A carnival of flesh and desire. Instead of the gates to The musical hell of Bosch, these works recreate the Garden of earthly delights, but reversing the palette and the forms in which tradition has shown us paradise. A paradise without a creator, without sin, where the symbols of colonial religion are assumed and reversed as a form of queerizing this reversal. Because if Saint Peter didn’t want to be crucified upside down, and his reversal was part of this pleading or tribute to God, Mynerva, as the bastard child of the hegemonic-religious-colonial status, assumes the “reversal” of the transvestite body, of the trans body, of the non-binary body, of the hiv+ body, not through the position of the body, not with the head at the bottom, but arse first; with the legs open, urinating on other bodies; enjoying masturbatory pleasure, showing the various forms of sacrilegious carnal pleasure between the adoration of this cross which has disappeared, like a cross of sand, into which they were transformed.
Taking the notion of Michel Foucault’s “reverse” discourse in his The History of Sexuality —when he describes the forms in which dominated groups have been able to take advantage of the reversibility of power—, and being well aware of it, using it both in iconographic and in political and philosophical form, Mynerva appropriates it as a means of empowerment and revenge, as visibility and with astuteness, to reverse the political-religious-moralizing-colonial interference with bodies. Therefore, in the performance, both bodies became crosses of sand which, hung from above —as occurs with the crosses of the way on the apachetas or huacas— could be discerned from afar in an association between religious martyr saints and pre-Hispanic goddesses. On this occasion, the symbols of martyrdom are not nails, but rather stigmas of vulvas and anuses emerge from their hands, their feet have platform soles as a radical form of consciously subverting the masquerade and performativity of gender and sexuality as a cultural construction. Nails do not grow from their fingers, but rather hypodermic needles which —like Lemebel’s headdress of syringes during the annual Gay Pride parade in New York, in June 1994— again had a relationship between sanctification and bestiality. Moreover, these body-crosses were protected by purple-coloured ecclesiastical stoles, in reference to the colour purple as a symbol of penitence, spiritual preparation and mourning, embroidered with gold. This beautiful embroidery work, which continues to be carried out in Peru for ecclesiastic garments, is
closely related to our Holy Week robes in Spain. Also assuming this colonial tradition, Mynerva lets us glimpse the imposition of beliefs and the legacy of exclusion that women and other bodies with dissident sexualities have had in their creation and evolution up to the present day. The artist, far from leaving them to one side, corrupts these traditions and legacies, passes them through sacrilegious states of transformation and transposition, where instead of putting the words of Christ and his blood, they embroider in gold their words as the title of the exhibition, “The Sweet Nectar of Your Blood”, on each of the two stoles that these sand crosses contain. These stoles also include, embroidered in gold on the left, very visibly, the dates that mark the self-knowledge of being hiv+: “January 2023”, in the case of Wynnie, and “April 2024”, in the case of Alexis Lima. Together with them, transformed iconographies which refer to the postulates between autochthonous beliefs and a new paradigm from which to look at this new present interconnected between friendship and sero-sorority between hiv+ bodies, since in the performance they were both connected by means of blood transfusion lines to a heart-sculpture between them. Mynerva thus intends to pay tribute to the memory and not forget the work of all those who have “given the body” and continued to claim this position from art. In this performance they both displayed, on the one hand, the marks of plunder and infection and, on the other, they payed tribute to and were proud of their condition, honouring the irreverent legacy committed to hiv/aids of previous artists from the South, such as the Chilean Yeguas del Apocalipsis in their famous action Las dos Fridas (The two Fridas)(1989), and the Peruvian artists Germán Machuca and Giuseppe Campuzano, who again took up this legacy in Las dos Fridas - Sangre/Semen - Línea de vida (The two Fridas - Blood/Semen – Life line) (2013).
Finally, this performance had its tribute as an offering, which was included as an artwork in a monument sculpture produced by the artist in La ofrenda (carrizo) (The offering [reed]) (2025). This work is included in the exhibition as another of the elements between the colonial past and the legacy of gratitude, projected into the future. Although these monuments are unknown in the Spanish context, in the Peruvian context reed monuments are used as altars for religious celebrations or for fireworks. In this case, the Mynerva’s intention is to relate the remains of the past, from that architectural and heritage landscape, to the condition of the infected body and the artist’s experience. Just like some huacas have the cross on high, this structure includes two purple stoles with embroidery that Wynnie and Alexis wore for the performance, as a way of also leaving a mark that talks about the past and about what occurred in this performative act with the aim of activating the legacy and projecting it.
-III-
As an epilogue, Mynerva introduces us to a sort of back door, as the end of the presentation in three acts. At first sight it would appear to be the entrance to something secret —in view of the narrowness of the passage between the oily skins of the painting and of the corridor—, like a sort of backroom, in reference to the premises of cruising gays, where the discharge of libido is consumed. If we take the performance and its mise en scène as a liturgy for the second space, this third area is a sort of sacristy, as it represents a kind of place behind the scenes in ecclesiastic ceremonies where the liturgy is prepared, or afterwards, the enchantment is deactivated, but never in sight of the worshippers.
Like always, Mynerva goes against the tide, and receives us in a space that has been taken by the same reed matting that we found at the beginning of the exhibition, which was used as a family shelter by the inhabitants of Villa El Salvador, and which now takes up the entire projection area from which comes techno dance music. The idea of the matting which covers everything is to
recall the viral irradiation which can infect everything, but at the same time humanize, protect, and decolonize. In this case, the Catalan land is transformed by reed matting of ancestral knowledge, which now multiplies like a virus and expands to the frenetic pace of a video clip. This continues to play in a repetitive, but danceable manner, with notions of trance music, in its dual nature as a ritual. This is both in the way that it has to transport us through the heartbeats — the rhythm produced by the “blood” entering and leaving with its systoles and diastoles—, and in the relationship with the tribal and telluric rituals of sonic-bodily transcendence where the music can take us to another dimension. In their video No es lo mismo padecerla, que bailarla… (Huaca infección) (It’s not the same to suffer it, as to dance it… [Infection Huaca]) (2025), the artist places us in a danceable active listening among the techno music, mixed with Andean sounds, among laughter and words in Quechua —which we are often unable to distinguish—, in addition to sounds of Andean wind instruments, such as the pututo, and other flutes which fill this hypnotic video with rhythm and mystery to close the exhibition.
Although in a fragmented manner, and edited far from the idea of linear time, the video has the form of a video clip, an audiovisual structure and production with a short duration and fast viewing, so that, like a video on the social media or on television, it can be viewed and “viralized” on numerous platforms and in different formats. This format was chosen to link form and content, in pursuit of an ending in which the joie de vivre and a bright future go hand in hand, without ceasing to resist and to continue with the struggle. The video is a performance that the artist recorded in the archaeological centre of Pachacámac, to the south of Lima. The artist uses the image of an ancestral past to infect it with their own blood from today, establishing a dialogue with this past to reinterpret it as a powerful living image that is projected into the future. Although Mynerva does not intend us to be spectators of a linear ending, and this video is repeated over and over again throughout this exhibition, it can then be offered in numerous formats and systems in which it can become “viral”. Its fragmentation also continuously cancels out a sort of understanding of itself by means of its different cuts, since this operates as a conclusion to the action of the two previous scenes or spaces.
We are first presented with the real and current space of Villa El Salvador as an image, placing us back in the context from which the exhibition and Wynnie Mynerva’s life started out. Later, we observe the divided artist walking naked among the sand, in search of something. It is as if the two figures from the canvas Desenterrar la arena (Unearth the sand) (2025) came back to life; seeking and excavating parts of an ancestral past. Suddenly, something strange moves in the night, a sort of illuminated construction that we cannot quite see, a lit-up monument which seems to be in a procession across this nocturnal landscape. While the viewpoint changes with sounds, a lying body, wearing a white cloth, instead of being mummified or in mortuary embalming, begins to touch itself and to rub its body lustily, giving way to another scene, in which the artist is presented at the top of the tablazo as a sort of ancestral divinity similar to Kali, one of the main goddesses of Hinduism, since she is the shakti —or energy— released from the male god Shiva. An ambivalent deity in their sex/gender relations which other artists have taken in relation to the hiv+ universe. In any case, the relationship that Mynerva establishes with these deities from other non-pre-Hispanic religions is the idea of combining the subject of rituality between various ancestral and spiritual pasts seen from today. Their representation is therefore that of an infected goddess Pachacámac, referred to in their painting Color en el vacío (Colour in the vacuum) (2025), just like the figure that the artist embodies and represents in the video.
A pause in echo, with the new frenetic rhythm of hammering blows, shows us the sliding of the tectonic plates, where hands with nails in the shape of a claw are mirrored, waiting, like molluscs with claws, to capture their victims. Sensual lips become eyes, vaginas, or recall anuses. While superimposed images of viruses are projected, the eye becomes a nipple, and the hairline recalls the abjection of the female sex, which forks and almost becomes a worm; and the navel takes us, like a channel of relations with the maternal and the primaeval, into a conduit for self-listening and affirmation. Though this umbilical channel, Mynerva shows us apocalyptic images, such as the three suns descending —which refer to legends that their grandmother told their mother in relation to the past in the remains of bones that they found, which they called abuelos (grandfathers) and which, the legends say, were found by the heat of the three suns—, which Mynerva now brings into this scene, as the destruction of everything.
The scenes speed by and open up new narrations. A needle is introduced into the arm, making blood gush out, and various images transport us to a new action as the symbol of the renewal of life. The artist works with iconographies from the pre-colonial past of their environment in Villa El Salvador, such as the Huaca del Templo del Sol, which was found in the twentieth century, and was not therefore plundered by the Spanish in colonial times. Together with this monument, the video shows us, at night, Mynerva’s body converted into architecture in the shape of a huaca. This structure is built with cane reeds —which we now recognize as the image which, in an uneasy manner, did not stop moving in the night-time procession, maybe to avoid being besieged, plundered or sullied—, which perform the function of a circulatory system for their own blood. Candles are installed in the connections of these reeds, and these candles are in turn connected to their arms by means of medical transfusion lines. While they dance, they perform a transfusion of their blood infected with hiv, giving birth to the huaca, and bringing it back to life. On top of the artist’s head is a red headdress, which also recalls this system of veins and arteries of the blood system, extending to the reed huaca. The image thus constructs a metaphor in which the artist’s blood sends light/blood to the candles, converting the huaca into an illuminated circulatory system. In it, past, present and future touch each other, multiplying the construction which, like a virus, does not cease to mutate. Recalling the bloody colonial violence perpetrated on these lands, while their body comes to life in the sexual desire of ecstasy, of the trance and of the cultural transmission of the past to a new future, where the stigma stops and is replaced with the pleasure of the body. Meanwhile, the drugs dance to change the alternative toward hope and, as Donna Haraway says in one of her latest books, it is necessary to live while “staying with the trouble”. But for Mynerva it is not a problem, but rather a virtue and a blessing. Therefore, toward the end of the video, the infected reed huaca becomes a monument for parties and fireworks, just like in local festivities in Peru.
An orgiastic and festive ending, in which the firework displays go hand in hand with viral strains, with the body eroticized, with the Incan architecture and huacas, assuming that the past legacy is a good shelter, like the matting on which Mynerva makes us see this production. Again with their danceable rhythm, the artist once more removes the drama and the gloom from the stigma, and positions us in a place from where, like them, the infection has made it possible to see the world with other eyes. This exhibition is therefore a turning point in Wynnie Mynerva’s journey, at the same time as a new way of reading, from an artistic legacy, the relationship between coloniality and hiv+ infection, hand in hand. Both starting from images on large painted canvases, and in the formative and videographic actions of non-normative hiv-positive bodies, Mynerva has gone one step further in bodily investigations in relation to the experience as a virus-carrying body. With its strength and size, the work emerges as a mechanism for emancipation and revenge, on subverting and rewriting a new mythology, on taking and transforming their own biography into a new speculative fiction, starting from the creation of this new narrative, which is the connection of each of the different works, spaces and meanings of this exhibition, which we absorb, with commitment, as sweet nectar.
February 27, 2025
