Performing reparative history in the Andes: Travesti methods and Ch’ixi subjectivities

Abstract

This article explores the Travesti Museum of Peru, a portable and conceptual artwork created by Giuseppe Campuzano that presents Peruvian history through queer, trans, and Indigenous perspectives. It argues that this project is reparative by way of bringing Andean genders and sexualities back into history as a form of anti-colonial and queer politics. This research uses Andean modes of analysis to describe the Travesti Museum as a trans-temporal archive and practice of travestismo in both its form and content. In this text, travesti performance is defined as a mnemonic strategy while situating the Travesti Museum within the contexts of Andean performance repertoires, discussions of class and race, as well as within the history of colonial refusal – arguing that Campuzano’s methods interrupt Western assumptions about the archive. It brings together the ideas of Campuzano and Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in an effort to highlight critical concepts from the Andes that are informed though embodied methods of thinking through history and resistance, resulting in a reading of radical Andean intimacy. The article concludes that the Travesti Museum can be used to analyze how the body relates to ideas of history, and as a tool to learn how we could write history starting with an embodiment of collective memory.