A performance by Wynnie Mynerva and Alexis Lima.

Inspired by Pedro Lemebel’s Sidario and by the ritual materiality of the shroud as a canvas that gathers the last breath, Sidario is a choreographed action reflecting on HIV in contexts of health crises such as the Peruvian one.

The action begins with Wynnie entering from the street into the museum’s atrium, dragging on their body fragments collected from the public space: urban debris, fabrics, yarns. Inside, Alexis awaits, dressed in white, carrying a clay pot and surrounded by syringes. As music plays, Alexis draws blood from Wynnie’s arm, places it into the vessel, and wraps it in a white shroud. Finally, she imprints Wynnie’s face with that blood onto the cloth, inscribing another way of naming what has been denied.

The performance establishes an allegory between HIV, sex work, precaritization, racialization, gender, and death—not as destiny, but as a condition imposed by the structural neglect of national institutions such as the Peruvian state. The “buh,” as HIV is named within trans communities in Peru, appears here as a virus crossing the museum’s membrane in order to infect it.

With references to drag club kid aesthetics, Sidario is a ritualistic action with Andean resonances that politicizes bodies the system seeks to erase—and which nonetheless insist on persisting.