Maya Watanabe (Lima, 1983, lives in Amsterdam) is a visual artist and filmmaker who produces video installations. Through an examination of the intersections between personal and collective memory, the artist highlights the tension and violence that mark political conflicts in her home country, Peru, common to other contexts around the world. Her work emphasizes how these scenarios impact our way of life and create gaps in the subjectivity, history, and memory of the people affected.
Collaborating with Peru’s Specialised Forensic Team, Bullet documents the skull of an unidentified body murdered by the Peruvian Armed Forces during the period of violence that devastated the country from 1980 to 2000 and claimed the lives of almost 70,000 people. Among the remains found, many are still tagged as “NN”–“No Name.” Just like a rocky landscape with craters of different sizes, bone reefs, and deep ravines, the inner part of the skull is revealed through a small hole: the hole of a bullet. The camera travels from there, from the surface to the interior of the bone case.
The image of the spider web found inside the skull indicates the passage of time, the government’s neglect and lack of interest in addressing cases of unidentified bodies—in contexts of arbitrary executions—like the one in the video. It becomes a concrete symbol of social inequality and adds new layers of meaning to the notion of ecology, ranging from political and social ecology to decolonial and cosmopolitical approaches. In this sense, Bullet addresses the forces that permeate people’s lives: natural or social forces that override observation, imagination, and memory.

Video Room: Maya Watanabe is curated by Glaucea Helena de Britto, Assistant Curator, MASP. The exhibition is part of the year devoted to Histories of Ecology, which also includes solo shows by Abel Rodríguez, Clarissa Tossin, Claude Monet, Frans Krajcberg, Hulda Guzmán, Minerva Cuevas, the collective Mulheres Atingidas por Barragens, and André Taniki Yanomami, as well as the group exhibition Histories of Ecology and shows in the Video Room by Emilija Škarnulytė, Inuk Silis Høegh, Janaina Wagner, and the Vídeo nas Aldeias project.
 
Since 2019, MASP has had a sustainability working group and has implemented initiatives such as decarbonization, the purchase of renewable energy, and a waste management program—efforts that align with this year’s Histories of Ecology program. The new Pietro Maria Bardi building also incorporates sustainable solutions and has earned LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification.