Mancharisqa Nuñu: The fright from my womb.

Mancharisqa Nuñu is a sculptural installation composed of three life-sized latex casts, molded from the bodies of the artist’s grandmother, mother, and herself. These hollow figures, epidermal shells, are connected by a single, extended braid made from the artist’s own hair, which functions simultaneously as lineage and scar, tether and testimony.

The piece draws from Andean epistemologies, particularly the notion of "Mancharisqa Nuñu", translated as "the illness of the frightened breast". Rooted in ancestral knowledge, this concept speaks to a condition experienced by women who conceived during moments of war, forced displacement, or political terror, and who, according to oral tradition, passed that absorbed fear to their children through breast milk. Rather than framing this transmission through Western psychological models such as PTSD or somatic memory, the work engages a decolonial reading of intergenerational trauma grounded in affect, the body, and communal memory.

Latex, understood here as a prostheticskin, amplifies the affective qualities of the work: soft, porous, and translucent, it operates as a material of vulnerability and exposure. Its medical-industrial connotations echo the biopolitical control of women's bodies, while its flesh-like quality situates it as both wound and trace. Hair, in Andean cultures, is a carrier of fright and vitality, its severance a material gesture of loss and mourning. The braid sutures the figures into a shared archive of gendered violence, underscoring the corporeal as site of both memory and resistance.

Through this visceral gesture, the artist enacts a feminist, matrilineal counter-archive that resists erasure, invoking what Diana Taylor calls "the repertoire", a mode of embodied transmission that exists outside the written record. Mancharisqa Nuñu refuses to contain trauma in diagnostic labels; it gives it a body, a texture, a tether.

This installation was selected as a finalist for the 2024 edition of Pasaporte para un Artista, the National Visual Arts Contest organized by the French Alliance in Peru.