The Procession of the Pagan Virgins

In collaboration with Peruvian-Chilean artists Natalia Cabezas and Fátima Ayala, the artist presents a performative action in which the three transform themselves into virgins that break away from the confines of the Western religious imagination. Drawing from their respective Afro-Peruvian, Quechua, and Mapuche identities, they embody the “hill virgins” (vírgenes cerros) depicted in the visual tradition of the Peruvian Cusco School, as well as other ancestral entities and symbolic elements.
The performance unfolds as a procession—an embodied and decolonial ritual that invokes the spiritual connection between motherhood and Pachamama (Mother Earth), while critically engaging with the complex, often reductive, representations of femininity within Catholic iconography.
Presented during Holy Week in the streets of Lima, this living tableau challenges dominant narratives of sanctity, fertility, and purity, reclaiming space for indigenous cosmologies and alternative forms of sacredness in the public sphere.