Among the many voices that inhabit Verde-Distância, the work of Aileen Gavonel Arenas in collaboration with Máxima Acuña offers a powerful invocation of resistance, tenderness, and rootedness.
Titled Amor Sin Límite: Crónicas en Tragadero Grande, this project draws from Gavonel’s participation in the Hawapi camp in 2019, held on the land of Máxima Acuña—a prominent defender of the Peruvian highlands against extractive violence. Through an intimate process of exchange, Gavonel weaves together a series of clay bead necklaces made from local soil with a handwoven manta crafted by Acuña herself. Together, these materials form a sculptural installation that resists the erasure of ancestral territories, embodying instead the slow persistence of life, care, and connection to land.
The work operates at the intersection of memory and material. The beaded forms echo both the fragility and endurance of lived resistance, while the manta, as both textile and testimony, holds the warmth of a body that refuses to be displaced. In this collaborative gesture, the object becomes a bearer of relational knowledge—between artist and activist, between soil and skin, between the visible and the deeply felt.
Amor Sin Límite is not simply a monument to struggle, but a porous, living archive—one that pulses with the emotional, environmental, and political charge of a territory defended through love.
