Queering Peru's archives

Reading archives differently

Alvarez Chavez, a sociologist, queer activist and ISS PhD candidate, has curated Queering Brüning's Archive, an exhibition intervention at the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK) in Hamburg, Germany.

Part of the wider exhibition Resonating Images from Peru, the project engages with photographs and documents created by German traveller Hans Heinrich Brüning, who lived in Peru between 1875 and 1925. Through a queer lens, Alvarez Chavez explores how archives can reveal alternative ways of understanding culture, history and social life.

Reconstructing queer spaces

Drawing on archival research and critical fabulation methodologies, the exhibition reconstructs possible queer spaces and practices in Peru's past. The work is also informed by Alvarez Chavez's autoethnographic field research in chicherías in northern Peru – places where chicha, a traditional corn beer, is produced and consumed. According to his research, these spaces have often facilitated forms of community and encounters that transcend binary gender roles.

The intervention consists of nine images from Brüning's archive and the video Chicherías, Community and Queer History, recorded in the chichería Tía Julia in Puerto Eten, northern Peru, in March 2026. In the film, Alvarez Chavez, interviewed by Dr Walther Maradiegue, reflects on the motivations, methodologies and possibilities behind these alternative readings of the archive.

Visit the exhibition

The exhibition forms part of Resonating Images from Peru and is on display at MARKK in Hamburg until 27 June 2027. On 2 July 2026 at 19:00, Alvarez Chavez will also lead a workshop at MARKK, where he will discuss his approach to archival work and the process of imagining alternative narratives and histories.