Wynnie Mynerva showed looks erotic-holidays, both have blue and red hair and their artwork contains a high sexual voltage. Their performances they can bother or shock: in ‘I am a beginning and an end’ an animal appeared eating her dead calf and, later, she ingested the remains of her clandestine abortion [en Per interrumpir un embarazo sigue siendo ilegal].
But Wynnie Mynerva (her real name, by the way) is already emerging as one of the rising Peruvian artists, with exhibitions in galleries in New York, Milan and now in ARCOwhere he presents another work that will not go unnoticed: ‘Close to Open’, which he has already exhibited at the Ginsberg Gallery in Lima.
What might seem like a colorful installation of Plexiglas sculptures, a pop explosion, takes on another meaning when you watch the central video: a surgical intervention in which a surgeon sutures a vagina (that of the artist) to close it. “I don’t identify with the idea of a biological woman. This surgery has changed my life. I had been planning it for a long time. My work has to do with that: how I represent myself through the flesh, the real thing. And although visually it appears to be female, I do not feel represented with the figure of a woman, at least as it is understood in this very conservative society: someone vulnerable, a target of attacks, an object of procreation and use. When I met the non-binary I understood that this was my place, that I could abandon femininity for a space to create my own identity where I can change, mutate”, she explains.
Wynnie Mynerva’s is not a gratuitous provocation. It is a revolt against 21 centuries of History of Art in masculine (his first career of him, then he will do Fine Arts), a revenge against the violence in his country and her cry of reaffirmation in coordinates that she herself has invented.
- To a simple question about painting and performance his answer is this:
- Painting is like my romantic love for art, like imagining a future. I love the performance because it is the present, reality. You go out into the street and there is a dead person, they insult you, they attack you, they rob you…
- .So is your present?
- The other day I went to a chifo [restaurante] to eat with my girlfriend Ali and there was a shooting [tiroteo]. Recently, our cell phones were also stolen with a weapon.
- A knife…?
- A gun. People are armed here, the peripheral districts of Lima are no man’s land.
It is not easy to grow up in one of those districts. And less being a woman. “There are situations that definitively mark your life. In Villa El Salvador, the basic thing that one must fulfill is to save one’s life,” she points out. Raised from nothing in the 70’s and despite its heavenly name, Villa El Salvador is one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Lima. In 1987, from Espaa He received a Prince of Asturias Award for Concord for his “exemplary practice in organizing a type of economically productive and caring city”, an alternative for the peoples who are victims of underdevelopment and injustice.
Wynnie Mynerva had not been born yet (she would be in 91), but her memories as a child are these:
“The streets were full of prostitution, it’s very common here, and drugs were openly sold. In my mind I associate sex with prostitution. I spent my adolescence trying to hide my identity, not to be seen, not to show myself as a sexual body… In situations of violence one wants to annihilate oneself, it is a survival mechanism. You went out to buy bread and you saw a guy bleeding to death. And nobody did anything. The prostitutes in my house were screaming for help. And nobody did anything. It is something that is not talked about, but it happens continuously. It’s been internalized, it’s become part of the landscape.”
In this landscape, Wynnie Mynerva takes refuge in art. He oh he confronts his traumas, his memories of the violence. “The stronger the repression, the stronger the opposing energy, the drive to create, to escape, to respond,” he says. His first exhibition, ‘The Other Sex’ (2018), consisted of a sample of genital organs, hyperreal sculptures taken from molds of anonymous models. She had to close it down early because of the complaints. Then came ‘Sex Machine’ (2019), a repertoire of dildos and machines created by herself for pleasure (a dildo with a baby’s head stands out, with the symbolic idea of transmuting the pain of childbirth into pleasure).
“At that time I read the ‘Contrasexual Manifesto’ of Paul Preciado and it blows my brain. I realized that everything can be a dildo: a hand, an arm. Pleasure is not only in the sexual organ. The natural and the biological begin to detach from me, like an idea that can be detached from my body.“, seala.
‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ (2020) was his particular reinterpretation of Bosch in an Edean orgy and with ‘Sweet Castrator’ (Dulce Castradora, 2021) it was the women who subjugated the men, led by a quote from the painter baroque Artemisia Gentileschiextracted from the harsh trial for her rape.
“It’s a great visual revenge. From art many stories of rapes have been constructed, with all those kidnappings in which men take women and they seem to go willingly. I feel angry and I want to express it, show how the female figure has been dominated and punished,” says Mynerva. She painted scenes of great crudeness: in ‘All my tears’ a woman cries while a man ejaculates on her and in ‘Come de mi cuerpo’ a hand offers a severed breast on a plate.
And then came the most radical act. “For me, abandoning femininity was a way to fight and win my freedom. People see you as a woman-vagina, always sexually ready. Closing her physically was just the closure I already had mentally. I don’t feel identified with her, I don’t use her to have sex (I practice a wide range of what you can imagine). I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t need her as such, as she came naturally to me, “she defends.
He contacted several sex reassignment gynecologists to perform an operation that no one had done. All were negative until a surgeon specializing in vaginal reconstruction said yes, it could be done.. “I sewed three quarters of my vagina, leaving what was necessary to menstruate and release fluids. I cut a part of meat to stretch it and that it would be smooth, without any skin. It worked perfectly, I was very happy with the operation, like women when they give to light,” he explains.
- Doesn’t it pose any physical risk?
- Neither. What’s more, I haven’t had any infections again.
- And is it painful?
- No. An abortion is more painful.
- Can it be reversed?
- yes and no You have to graft skin and it is a very complex process.
- Is it a personal decision or an artistic gesture?
- The personal ends up being artistic. There is an idea to manifest myself. Although I am clear about where my sexual orientation is going [se define como pansexual] I want to leave a mark, feel like the designer of my own body.
His biography can be read in his artistic actions, such as the controversial performance of her abortion. “The first time I had an abortion I was 18 years old, it was very painful physically and mentally. I suffered a lot, I felt like I was killing a child. The second time it wasn’t like that, I was more seasoned and already working in art. a process of my body”, he exposes. So he replied what some mammals do: “The placenta has opioid properties that soothe postpartum pain. But so do meat scraps: there are animals that instinctively eat their young when they are stillborn to relieve pain. Why something that comes out? Can’t she get back in? Why can’t I reconcile with her and have her remain a part of me? It was like a ritual.”
Two days before the opening of ARCO, Wynnie Mynerva is already on the Madrid. As always when traveling to other countries, when you go down the street you can’t help but look back, alert. Lima instinct.
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