Imperial Nostalgias is a video performance and installation documenting a walk along Mansiche Avenue while burning palo santo toward the main entrance of Mall Aventura Plaza Trujillo, in the city of Trujillo, northern Peru.
Mansiche was one of the first Indigenous settlements established after the arrival of the Spanish and the displacement of the inhabitants of Chan Chan. Today, the farmlands, earthen benches, and stables described by César Vallejo in his poem of the same name over a century ago have disappeared. They have been replaced by the concrete and cement of a shopping mall. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trujillo also exposed the lack of investment in hospitals and the deep crisis of the public healthcare system. Progress and development have come to be measured by the number of shopping malls built over the past decade, such as this concrete monument that has transformed and gentrified the former village of Mansiche.
The ritual of burning palo santo is performed to cleanse fear, a space, or a place, while also creating a connection with ancestral worlds. In Peru, where do we go to heal when we live within such a precarious and absent state? This action is an act of mourning for those who died during the pandemic—a farewell accompanied by the sweet smoke of sacred wood.