Mayra Villavicencio Príncipe

The genesis of this research project is a reflection on the map of Peru drawn by the cosmographer Diego Méndez in 1574. This map was first published in the 1578 edition of the “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum”, the first atlas of the modern world. It was conceived as a way of making not only geographical but also epistemic territories transparent from a Western perspective. Méndez based his work on accounts of explorations in colonised territories. Villavicencio’s reflection leads her to attempt to dismantle the imperial cartographies that have constructed racialising imaginaries that persist in the technical images generated by contemporary systems of control. The question is raised: What continuities exist between the production of maps in the sixteenth century and the generation of technical images in the twenty-first century?

The research then turns to a reflection on the images recorded by video surveillance cameras that documented the military and police abuse of demonstrators during the protests that took place in Peru between late 2022 and early 2023, during which 49 civilians lost their lives. This second phase seeks to reflect on and experiment with these images through opaque methods, conceived as a form of resistance to the colonial visuality that has persisted since the cartographies of the sixteenth century.

Through a speculative convergence using the medium of an installation that tensions these intervened images and attempts a kind of counter-mapping of a territory, the artist will attempt to reveal multiple layers of meaning in the images through their material opacity, counteracting the colonial visuality.

BIO
Mayra Villavicencio is a researcher and filmmaker. Her work focuses on the study of political violence in Peru and the visual regimes of coloniality. Through film, she has addressed the affective archive and political discourses that seek to construct alternative narratives. A graduate in Audiovisual Communication, she is currently studying for a master’s degree in Film Studies and Visual Cultures at the ESCAC and the University of Barcelona.

As a researcher, she has conducted studies focused on films produced in the aftermath of the internal armed conflict in Peru, with particular attention to discourses of memory and gender. She presented part of her research at the Latin American Women’s Filmmaking Conference (2017) at the University of London and at the International Colloquium on State Violence in Peru (2022) at UNSCH, Ayacucho. She also presented the progress of her research project on the opacity of video surveillance images in contexts of protests at Reframing the Archive (2023), the Archivo Platform’s International Colloquium on Photography and Visual Culture.

As a filmmaker, she participated in the Process of Error LAB in Valparaíso (2019) with her first short film “CASSETTE 6”. In 2020, she was part of the Silencio Collective, with which she made the film “Dust no Longer Clouds our Eyes” (El polvo ya no nubla nuestros ojos). This work has been shown at various national and international festivals, such as Mar del Plata, Jeounju, Documenta Madrid, L'Alternativa and Punto de Vista, among others.