Brand Perú (Marca Perú)

Brand Perú is a durational performance enacted across emblematic public spaces between Lima, Peru, and Santiago de Chile. This work articulates a powerful denunciation of sexual and reproductive violence, specifically the systemic forced sterilizations carried out during Peru’s internal armed conflict. These acts of state violence, targeting predominantly Indigenous and rural women, inscribed enduring traumas in the nation’s sociocultural body.

The performance begins with the artist slowly removing her own clothing and replacing it with garments donated by real victims of these atrocities. The act culminates in a moment of corporeal inscription: the word “PERÚ” is carved into her thighs, while her blood stains a white undergarment that evokes the Peruvian flag, now ruptured and permanently marked. This gesture materializes a country wounded, divided, and still awaiting justice.

The title alludes to the official nation branding campaign Marca Perú, launched to promote tourism and investment by projecting an image of progress, unity, and multicultural pride. Created at a time when judicial processes regarding reproductive violence were reaching key moments, the piece exposes the dissonance between state-led self-promotion and institutional denial. Here, the artist reclaims the word “marca” (mark) not as logo, but as wound: a scar left by the violence the state refuses to acknowledge. The true mark of Peru, the work suggests, lies in this unresolved fracture.

From its inception, the performance has met with severe repression. When first staged in 2018 outside the Palacio de Justicia in Lima, the artist was forcibly removed by state security forces. In a subsequent iteration in 2022, again at the same location, the artist was violently assaulted by members of the Peruvian National Police, who threw her down over 30 steps, resulting in serious physical injuries. These incidents underscore the ongoing mechanisms of institutional silencing and the risks artists assume when bodies confront power.

Brand Perú becomes a living archive, an insurgent body that refuses historical erasure, insisting on memory as a political force. The piece embodies necropolitical critique, transforming pain into performance, and demanding recognition where the state has imposed silence.

The work has since been performed in sites that themselves carry the weight of memory and violence, including Londres 38, a former torture center and current space of historical memory in Santiago de Chile (2024), and was part of the Margem Visual Festival in Brazil (2023).