Following the Sun. Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña

I Swear

We welcome the springtime with the start of this new edition of the series Following the Sun, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani. On this occasion, Gabriel presents a programme that questions societal normativity, inviting queer, decolonial, dissident and antiauthoritarian voices to the terrace of the Museu Tàpies, presided by the artist’s Mitjó [Sock], an iconic image of marginalisation.

The series opens with Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña, with many questions along the way: What conditions are imposed when someone does not consent to “belong”? Losing their home? Being forced to live on the margins? Renouncing everything that is theirs to access a different culture? Trans bodies, migrant bodies and so many others are threatened because they do not fit into the standards that not even Antoni Tàpies’ Mitjó can respond to.

The proposal invites us to draw and erase borders, tracing the experience of confronting Spanish and European migratory institutions. This involves a negotiation based on contradiction, in a context that refuses to resonate with a plurality of bodies that express themselves as dissident, as disobedient—intentionally or not—and which, in their own way, respond to the expectations of normative society.

Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña (she) is a culebra travesti born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1991, and a migrant with Spanish nationality, after having resided in the Kingdom of Spain for a few years. She was trained as a psychotherapist and studied a postgraduate course in Mediation and Artistic Research. Since 2015 she has combined her work in psychotherapy, dedicate to trans and sexually diverse people, as well as migrants, racialised individuals and children, with an artistic practice as a performer, where she also engages her own experience as a member of some of these collectives.

Photograph: Florian Hetz