In one of her last messages on social media, weeks before her premature death on July 14 at the age of 27, Perla Zúñiga wrote: “Today I think that there is life after death and that I want to be a Viennese girl with short blonde hair, who makes her own homemade granola and mixes it with lots of fruit and nut creams. She wears pretty, colorful clothes and studies art.” In reality, Perla Zúñiga was that Viennese girl, as she was a thousand other things in a life marked from the age of 19 by Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that brought her face to face with her body early on, generating in turn a deep and delicate artistic project. queergiving his intimate nightmare an unsuspected creative flight, of an imagination and emotion that leave a mark.
Zúñiga was studying Fine Arts in Madrid when she received her first chemotherapy treatment. That harsh chemical invasion helped her transition into Joven de la Perla: “If biblically a woman is born from a man’s rib, I am born from a titanium rib made with a 3D printer,” she said in 2021 in an interview with this newspaper. From Madrid, she moved to Berlin, and from there to Barcelona, traveling through London and Buenos Aires. While the disease took its course, so did life and Perla expanded her universe, from writing to visual arts, from performance to sound. In her small visual poems she hid an artistic practice connected to illness —with references such as Pepe Espaliú, Carolyn Lazard, Nan Goldin or Anne Boyer—, but also to time, desire and love. One of her last poems, published on her Instagram account, said: “It’s 2015 and you dream of being an artist/ you go to raves, you try acid/ and you idolize Robert Mapplethorpe/
It’s 2016 and you’re planning to move to Berlin with your best friend/ You paint like Tracey Emin and draw a white dove in a hospital room/
It’s 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020,/ 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024/ and you keep dreaming/ despite the illness/
“Friend wake up/we have created the backstage of the world and we can go whenever we want”
Awarded in 2023 in the Generations program of La Casa Encendida, her latest solo exhibition, entitled They suck It was at the Cordova space in Barcelona. In it, she used cages, urine jars and moving boxes to express, always with a particular mix of humour and rage, her complex life confinement. In 2020 she participated, also at La Casa Encendida, in the Gelatina stage activities programme with the sound piece Dear altered cell and that same year he created a cycle of performative readings (Poem Room) for the Conde Duque Contemporary Culture Centre. He collaborated continuously with the Yaby curators and performed as a DJ at Sónar 2023. He was also a resident of the festival queer Maricxs, and co-founder with Vera Amores of the CULPA collective, a space, in their words, “created to celebrate and vindicate trans and non-binary existences at night.”
Although one of the languages that Perla Zúniga explored was writing, her idea of community distanced her from any solitary practice. Just as she defended culture to deal with illness, Perla used friendship as a source of artistic creation. In a posthumous article published on the Ctxt website and entitled Imagine hospitals, He wrote: “I propose a space similar to the chapel, but secular, and I imagine it adjacent to the hospital, in the form of a house. This little house would be connected to the world of culture. It would be a place of exchange focused on accompaniment and active listening.”
I met Perla Zúniga because she was a close friend of my daughter’s since school. In a conversation between the two of them also published in Ctxt, The artist unravelled her universe, always connected to her fertile imagination. When asked about the references to Tinker Bell in her work, she said: “My grandfather has always called me Peter Pan. I think I bring up his figure to pay homage to him and to reconcile myself with my childhood. Making these drawings is my way of communicating with him, of saying goodbye, because I feel that I was not able to do it well, and he has been a very important male figure for me. He always waited for me with a cigarette in his sky-blue Atos and a joke. He took me wherever I wanted and never questioned me for wearing a skirt. I owe my humour and my anarchic spirit to him.”
A few weeks after this conversation, this artist, DJ and poet passed away in her family home in a village in the mountains of Madrid, surrounded by her family, her friends and her partner, the Argentine poet and editor Mariano Blatt. She asked that her ashes rest next to those of her grandfather. Perla’s light, her intelligence, her humour, her integrity and clairvoyance marked her final days, in which she was able to see the immense love that she had generated around her in so few years, and to say goodbye to her family with the breeze of the mountains, the sun and the mountains. On her social networks she described her final landscape like this, all in lowercase: “Today I moved to the village. The mountains are my new god. I’m amazed that everything we do in our lives is not for them. I hear birds when I get up from my nap. The neighbour cuts the grass. Mariano cooks for me. I’m sick, but today I breathed. I was happy for a while.”