CV
Born in Lima-Callao. Lives in Vienna near the Danube.
Education
PhD. Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Candidate to the Doctorate in Philosophy. Dissertation topic: Aesthetic Cosmopolitical Practices of Diasporic Latin American Collectives in Austria. Supervised by Prof. Ruth Sonderegger.
MA Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Master thesis title: Ways to a Communal Aesthetics: Towards Political Ontological Justice. Diploma with distinction.
MA Fine Arts. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Master thesis title: Geographies of Selves. Roots in the Dark. Diploma with distinction.
BA Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Studienabschluss with distinction. Study focus: Decolonial aesthetics and art practices.
BA Fine Arts. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Studienabschluss with distinction. Study focus: Post-conceptual art, Drawing, Contextual painting.
BA Sociology. Universidad Católica del Perú. Study focus: Theory and Sociology of Culture.
BA Communication Sciences. Universidad de Lima. Study focus: Visual Arts and Communication for development.
Artistic projects
2024 Narcissus. Aural piece for Tratado material IV: Narcissus’ echo. Revisiting the myth of Narcissus to examine the impact of the colonial proposal of life that confronts nature in an extractive way, in its perpetual search for progress and development. Also suggesting that our relationships with other earth-beings (such as water) activate alternatives for transformative action. Revising notions of “seeing” the self and transformational encounters with water that reveal the power of water and the persistence of life.
2024 - 2023 Vital Knowledges. Audiovisual work as a result of frequent dialogues with the beings featured. Produced in collaboration with plants and other phenomena of life from my neighborhood, as well as from the surroundings of Pachacamac, a pre-colonial ceremonial center south of Lima, Peru. Vital knowledges as the basic knowledges we need to have in order to live.
2021 - 2023 They live, eat, gather, cooperate, laugh, dance, hug, precognize, dream. When we come together to act on our desires of transformation, we tear space-time and are in parallel in the present-past-futures that we are. Together we weave spaces in which we are interdependent, in which colonial capitalism is suspended, and in which we are guided by affective cosmopolitics that revolve around vital knowledges.
2022 - 2019 The plant that is conscious in me. A continuous thread from the first forms of life, and the learnings of all the species that precede us and are present in every part of ourselves. Personal-collective diasporic learnings that manifest in dreams, visions, and in our collective political doings, contributing to maintain a sense of connectedness and of belonging amidst the unrootedness of non-citizenship and migration. Learning from the neighbor bodies of water, plants, lichen, soils that make us, and tuning to a consciousness beyond the structures of accumulation and exploitation.
2022 Ancient Losses: Manifestations of mourning over the loss of life as it was once known. Research, drawing and writing on the five previous planetary extinctions, and what we can learn from them.
2022 Movements and languages in which life manifests itself. Research, drawing and painting on the evolving forms of life and how all the capacities we carry within us were once developed and tested out millions of years ago, and how certain forms repeat themselves throughout what we call nature.
2022 - 2021 Omens and Shared Destinies was an invitation to invoke futures far from anthropocentrism, colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism. Collaborative works and a publication. Bisagra.
2022 - 2021 Cosmic, Planetary, Communal: Learning from Neighbor Earthbeings. Un trabajo que emerge al prestar atención y buscar crear relaciones sociales con los seres y fenomenos que viven y ocurren en mi vecindad.
2021 Unearthing memories, feeding practices for plural knowledges and beings. With Eliana Otta, Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki, Nuno Cassola. Fellowship program von Impact - Pact Zollverein.
2020 - 2021 After Progress: Stories of Endarkment. With Eliana Otta. Unit of Play. Goldsmiths University of London. Script and audiovisual work.
2021 Learning from plants. Paper and audiovisual work documenting affective relationships I have with particular plants that are part of my biography.
2020 Virus and bacteria peoples redrawing ideas on life. Research, writing, drawings.
2020 Communal Technologies: Ritual Offering. A condensation of experiencing the collective ritual as an offering and political practice of recognition of what sustains symbiotic life on Earth. A technology that helps to de-fetishize hegemonic relations with what we call nature in systems of accumulation that continue to accelerate the climate crisis. A community practice with transformative political potential. Collective rituals and paper "Rituals and Co-razonadas” 2021.
2020 - 2019 Underground Blossomings: Roots in the Dark. Research on an aesthetic of darkness and the underground soil through a darawing series and peer reviewed paper.
2018 The Ritual: Art as healing praxis. Researching rituals through artistic practices as spiritual technologies of reconnection and defetishization. Artist and co-curator with Verena Melgarejo Weinandt for Parabol Nr. 9 by Section D. Presented in Vienna Contemporary 2018. With the support of section D and Rotor Graz.
2018 Condor Puma Serpiente. Autohistoria research through drawing portraits of central women in my maternal family line. Along research on the condor, the puma, and the snake, as spiritual animal guides in Abya Yala.
2018 - 2017 Back/s Together: Gloria Anzaldúa, her drawings, our connections to her. With Verena Melgarejo Weinandt at theVBKÖ.
2016 Anticolonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies. Research, exhibition and publication. Recollection of artistic decolonial tools and methods. Written questionnaires sent to students and teachers that politically identified as Black and people of color on how decolonizing the university would look like. Book publication. With Sunanda Mesquita and Sophie Utikal.
2016 Coca relatives. A bio/grafía of the coca plant. Extensive research about the coca plant and its entanglements between capitalism, colonialism and imperialism. The earliest archaeological findings of its use, botanical records, representation in precolonial art, indigenous names, colonial history in the mines, perspective from the church, history as cure-it-all medicine, illegalization, spiritual role and current chemical and botanical studies. Part of Flowers of Evil / Blümen des Bösen / Flores del Mal at VBKÖ, Vienna.
2016 A Look Back in to the Museum. Research on the colonial and NS history of the Institut für Kunstlerische Erziehung IKL. With Verena Melagerejo Weinandt. Lecture-performance in Uncanny Materials | Founding Moments of Art Education. XExhibit. Vienna.
2015 Wer Hat Angst vor dem Museum? Research on the history of the Ethnographic Museum of Vienna and its role in regards to the colonial project. Presented as an art exhibition and a series of performances and talks with artists on their own research works. With Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Marissa Lobo, and Pedra Costa. Part of Wienwoche.
2014 - 2015 Useful Art. Researching and implementing an artivist history course for high-school students. With historic examples of the political potential of art, and artivist emancipatory tools that can be implemented to deal with social and political phenomena we want to transform. The classes gathered urgent social issues of the local community, and used the taught methods to create artistic proposals of direct action. Through artivist strategies and public interventions, projects criticized sequels of colonialism and enslavement, institutions, authority, the use of public space, neoliberal economic measures, education, gender, class, animal abuse, migration, housing, and unequal power structures.
2013 - 2014 Migration and detention centers. Working group researching on migration routes from Ceuta, and repression mechanisms at the borders.
2013 - 2016 Columbus in Vienna. Independent research on places in public and semi-public space dedicated to Columbus in Vienna.
2013 Wahlwexel. Voting Rights for All. Working group researching on electoral law and citizenship in Austria and the growing exclusion of voters that affect democracy. With the support of Wienwoche, Univ. Prof. Gerd Valchars and of Dr. Monica Mokre in a second edition in 2020.
2011 - 2012 Platform for artistic interventions in history politics. Part of research based working group concerned with the NS history of the Austria and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Including the arianization of objects that were part of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, furnishings, monuments, and plaques commemorating NS-artists. Critique and interventions in problematic sites in Vienna.
2011-2012 AAAR Artists Activists Auction Against Racism. Employing the auction as a means of supporting non-EU students from ex-colonial spaces. Precedent of the current auction of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
2011 Telenovela. Working group that employed story telling as a method to track stories of migration and their coping with migratory bureaucratic stress, as well as the threat of falling into an illegal status. Recollection of personal stories and their adaptation into a telenovela format. Telenovela as a method that through exaggerated mannerisms allowed to satirize the perceived absurdity and injustice of many situations. Collective reading of the dialogues and filming of a telenovela. With the support of Gin Müller and Maiz from Linz.
2010 - 2012 The Darker Side of the Academy. Working group. Exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Research and documentation of the MA35 demands made to non-EU students that prove they can cost their studies (f.e. a specific sum in the bank account that covers their student year) while demanding that their work income is lesser than that amount. Filtering in this way students without savings, prohibiting self-sufficiency and implying the studies of non-EU students have to be costed by sponsoring actors (f.e. their parents).
2010 - 2011 Arbeitgruppe Migration. Working group with Petja Dimitrova, Marissa Lobo, Miltiadis Gerothanassis, Annalisa Cannito, Cain Chui, Okena Okefor (and more) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Legal research that affected third country students which was employed to produce critical theory but also to employ legal loopholes to support students affected by the strengthening of these rules.
Selected Workshops and Talks
08-2021 Mediation work “Mein Sicht„ for the exhibition “And If I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” for the Kunsthalle Wien.
07-2019 Presentation of The Ritual: Art as Healing Practice. Talk and publication presentation. Rotor contemporary art space, Linz.
07-2018 Seminar “(Towards a critique of) Aesthetics as a byproduct of colonial capitalism”. With Univ.Prof.Dr.Phil. Ruth Sonderegger. Herr*krit Sommer-Universität – Herrschaftskritische. Universität Kassel.
04-2018 Talk on „Anticolonial Fantasies, Decolonial Strategies”. Kunstuniversität Linz.
03-2017 Lecture “Coloniality under De_construction” for the Ringvorlesung Dekoloniale Perspektiven und Aktivismen. Universität Wien.
Selected Art projects and exhibitions
2021 Teachings of the non-human: Learning from a multiplicity of worlds. District*School. Berlin
2020 Stories Song / Relatos Canción. Künst im Öffentlichem Raum Niederösterreich.
2019 The Eyes of All Things. Reclaim: Practices of Care in Public Space. NadaLokal. Vienna.
2019 Roots in The Dark, Blossomings in the Underground. Solo. Galerie Blütengasse, Vienna
2016 Anti*colonial Fantasies / Decolonial Strategies. Artist/Co-Curator. Friday Exit, Vienna.
Fellowships and Scholarship awards
2022 DOC PhD Fellow Austrian Academy of Sciences ÖAW 2022-2026.
2021 Fellowship from the Art Mentoring Program from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Under the mentoring of Elsy Lahner, curator for contemporary drawing at the Albertina Museum. 2020-21.
2020 KÖR Funds for Art in Public Space for the project "Kleine Post", Vienna.
2016 Funds from the Student Union of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Research project “Anticolonial Fantasies/ Decolonial Strategies”.
2015 Funds for the promotion of feminist / queer young scientists. Student Union of the University of Vienna. Research project “Illustrated colonial continuities: Austria-Peru”.
Selected Social sciences research
2007 Research assistance for “Building the bases for public politics respectful of diversity”. Skills and know-hows of primary school students in rural areas of Piura gathered from everyday activities transformed into recommendations for teachers to improve education. Sociological research. Univ.Prof. Dr. Patricia Ruiz Bravo. Lima, Cajamarca and Piura.
2006 Research assistance for “Socioeconomic impact of the activities of the Doe Run Mining Company in La Oroya, Perú.” Research department of the Universidad Católica del Perú. Sociological research. La Oroya and Lima.
2006 Research assistance for “Family violence in San Juan de Lurigancho. Personal and collective interviews to stay-at-home mothers and their experiences of physical violence.” Gender studies and anthropological research by Prof. Norma Fuller at the Universidad Católica del Perú. Lima.
2003 Systematizing testimonies, and data for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. The testimonies were provided by the family members of disappeared victims from the 1980-2000 civil war in Peru in order to help with their identification. Forensic Anthropology research team of the Commission. Lima.
2002 Cultural and pedagogical communication work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru as part of the Truth Promoters team of volunteers. Ayacucho and Lima.
Collectives
Current: Antikoloniale Interventionen in Wien, Feministisches Bloco Decolonial.
Past: AG Migration, AG Geschichtspolitik, The darker side of the Academy, Close Detention Centers, Trenza.