M work has developed at the intersection of scientific research, political activism and artistic practice. In Lima, I graduated as a communication scientist and as a sociologist and these studies provided me with many critical tools for research in practice and for developing ideas in multiple formats and platforms. I worked on transdisciplinary research projects that sought to contribute to issues of inclusive education, environmental conflicts and social violence.
In 2008 I arrived in Austria and I began to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2010, where the effect of the student protests was still being felt. There I was able to study Fine Arts and Art Theory and Cultural Studies, combining artistic, philosophical and cultural studies approaches together with an intense activism. In 2010 our classes focused on third world theory and decolonial issues, reading together and discussing Quijano, Lugones, Kilomba, Anzaldúa. We developed artistic projects such as the darker side of the Academy and problematized the absence of theories and artistic production from Latin America and the non-Western world in university curricula, the impact of colonialism in Austria, monuments and problematic sites, and the obstacles that migrant students must overcome in Austria. My activism in self-organized migrant groups, problematized BIPOC and queer histories and concerns.
Since 2013 along other Abya Yala migrants in Vienna we put effort in engaging in histories of spirituality that were part of our history and that we felt necessary to develop spaces where we were to speak about this. With this aim we funded our Trenza collective (Verena Melgarejo, Daniela Paredes, Caro Quiran, Luisa Lobo, Marissa Lobo) and developed rituals and offerings in our gatherings.
In 2015 "Who is afraid of the museum?" was one of such projects that we curated together with Verena Melgarejo, Marissa Lobo, and Pedra Costa.
In 2019 with my MFA thesis “Geographies of Selves / Roots in the Dark" I developed an art-based research on an Aesthetic of the Dark and the Underground. In this work, I explored my own history growing up in Peru during a time of socio-economic crisis and violent conflict. A time of constant blackouts caused by the Shining Path’s bombing of transmission towers. A time when my family made frequent ritual offerings and maintained mutual care relationships with plants as a way of living Andean-Amazonian family heritages, but also as strategies my family used to keep us safe. My overall motivation for this research is a preoccupation with a group of people that come from a long history of violence, exclusion, inequity, racism. People who here find new modes of exclusion, racism and inequity. And which leads me to find ways in which I can contribute to transform this.
Academically, this research deepened my interest in indigenous cosmopolitics, decolonial feminist border thinking, and other aesthetic histories. In these fields, I have found an interdisciplinary platform where I can examine collective and personal aesthetic practices that are connected to or influenced by a mestizo-indigenous aesthetic production, and a history of political and social struggles. Something I have dealt with in exhibitions, artistic mediation and writing.
In 2020 my master's thesis in Art Theory and Cultural Studies, "Ways to a Communal Aesthetics Towards Ontological and Political Justice," further underscored what might be the characteristics of an aesthetic that recognizes other ways of relating, caring, doing, and living.