Unsettling Violent Histories: Exploring the work of Elizabeth Lino-Cornejo and Karen Bernedo-Morales

Abstract

When we began to conceive of a special issue revisiting race and its relationship with gender and colonialism, we wanted to include perspectives and testimonies from people whose work might not be featured in an academic journal or considered ‘theory.’ Fortunately, LACES encouraged us to consider including alternative essays. With this in mind, in addition to five original research articles and two review essays, we include two interviews with Peruvian artists Elizabeth Lino-Cornejo and Karen Bernedo-Morales. María Elena García and Amy Cox Hall interviewed the two women in August of 2020 over Zoom. The impressive work of Elizabeth Lino-Cornejo and Karen Bernedo-Morales is recognized within Peru and globally. Both artists have spurred conversations on care, inequality, gender, memory, the body, rights and violence in Peru. In distinct ways, they both urge us to consider how art might be used to challenge abusive discourses and practices that have been normalized and lived realities for too long. Lino-Cornejo’s use of the feminized body to critique histories of capitalism, extractivism, and abuse, and Bernedo-Morales’ embrace of popular resistance and the histories of women through word and image, teach us something vital about the disruptive intersectional impact of Peruvian feminist approaches. Their work helps us think about how identities and inequalities are enacted differently across bodies and space, and how to live in those worlds to build more equitable and non-violent ones. In these interviews, both artists reflect on the ways the personal, professional, and political are entangled. They explore broad themes such as extraction, memory, and representation, and complicate understandings of activism, art, and agency. Elizabeth Lino-Cornejo is a performance artist who was born in Cerro de Pasco, the highest city in Peru and the site of the notorious and ever-growing open pit mine Raúl Rojas, currently over a mile wide and a quarter mile deep. Rimmed in azure blue tailings that make its toxicity chillingly aesthetic, the open pit mine is the result of years of extracting silver, zinc and copper among other metals. In 2009, Lino-Cornejo developed the persona ‘The Last Queen of Cerro de Pasco’ and has been performing as her ever since. We spoke with Lino-Cornejo about migrating to Lima, how she became involved in performance art, and how the use of satire has helped her understand and sustain connections between art and life, and the politics of activism and embodied memory.