Blatt & Ríos publishing house has just published I die, I love you of the Spanish artist, poet and DJ Pearl Zúñiga. The posthumous volume collects the poetry book that had been preparing before his premature death in July 2024, when he was barely 27 years old. It could be said that Perla Zúñiga had two births. One in Madrid at the end of 1996. another in 2016, when a sarcoma de Ewinga rare type of cancer that affects bones and soft tissues.
Perla studied Fine Arts in Madrid when she received her first chemotherapy. during the treatment he became aware of his body and how malleable gender identity is. “Chemotherapy, in the end, is a transition, a chemical process that alters the body” declared the Spanish newspaper The country In 2022. “I erased my identity, because the features that I thought aesthetically defined my person were no longer. I liked to understand that as the beginning of my own metaphor. The tumor is a dissident body, because their cells do not obey the sign of dying. It is an organism that does not follow the dominant logic imposed. And my trip was going to the time.”
I die, I love you proposes an alternative to common places from which cancer is addressed. “The disease and society are plagued with the use of war language. Therefore, to see the work of people who work from vulnerability and fragility and relate to the disease from other places contributed to my practice, my person and my relationship with the state of my body,” he told the Spanish magazine of art Exibart in January 2024.
Against the hardness of the war metaphor and favor of sensitivity, Perla gives her poetics her own “Affective turn”, An approach focused on feelings that breaks with dualism between reason and emotion. In the poem that opens the book, entitled “I’m dying, what do I write?” It reads: “Sometimes, the words are protected in the throat; they are afraid and prefer The ears, such as a memory, a sound or even a drawing. ”
As indicated by the title, I die, I love you It is also a book about love, and one of its gravitational centers is in the Argentine poet and editor Mariano Blatt. In another of the texts it reads: “We met through a book. An object. This object accompanied me during the first year of chemotherapy. Poetry. I was 18 years old, suffered cancer and longed for seeing, experiencing and feeling life as he described it. I wanted To that exhibition, I met Mariano, in person, and we fell in love.
I die, I love you It is a book that Pearl and he agreed to edit at the end of 2023. At that time she had not yet been diagnosed again with the tumor, so they were thinking of a book that gathered their poems until that time. “I was very happy and had put it to assemble it,” Blatt recalls. “A few weeks later, at the beginning of 2024, he received the new diagnosis. Those 6 months he lived began to write poems and the newspaper and talked about the evolution of the book, how it was going to organize, on the titles of each party, etc. He never sent me the final book, after he died I entered his computer, I looked in his folders and sent myself everything that had to do with the book or with texts. I let time spend and one day I started organizing all that material. It cost me a lot. ”
Shortly before his premature death on July 14 at the age of 27, Perla wrote: “Today I think there is life after death and that I want to be a vain girl with blond -dyed short hair, which makes her own homemade granola and mixture with many fruits and creams of nuts. He wears beautiful clothes and colors and studies arts.” Lto publication of I die, I love you It allows your will to come true in reading its pages, which update the footprint of your creative flight.
