by Chris Erik Thomas // May 19, 2026
Wynnie Mynerva’s new solo exhibition at Société, ‘Volveré y seré millones,’ turns a story of horror into hope. Taking its title from the last words of Túpac Katari, the 18th-century Andean revolutionary who was publicly dismembered by Spanish colonial forces, his message translates to: “I will return and I will be millions.” Here, ancient Andean folklore and the Peruvian artist’s ongoing experience navigating violence, immigration and the faulty image of Berlin as a site of sexual liberation meld.
Exploring themes of love, connection and collective organization, Mynerva transforms Société’s ground floor into a labyrinth, beginning with a broad, thick wall of clay and fragments of broken ceramics that greet visitors upon entry. An initial series of films—one on immigrant communities marrying as a survival strategy, another on Peruvian mototaxi drivers organizing in the face of government extortion—set the stage, before the space opens up, revealing a mise-en-scène of paintings, fabric scraps and a massive, central mural built into the clay wall that narrates an Andean legend of death and resistance.
In our conversation with the artist, Mynerva expands on the legends that shaped the exhibition’s narrative, strategies for changing the course of history and why a return home to Andean thought is essential to making sense of the world we’re living in.
Wynnie Mynerva, portrait // Photo by Manira Chaker, styling by Valeria Ramos Lopez, courtesy of the artist and Societe Berlin
Chris Erik Thomas: The title of the exhibition borrows from the last words of Túpac Katari. Elsewhere in the show, the legend of Inkarri also deals with dismemberment. What drew you to using these stories of annihilation to center the show’s narrative?
Wynnie Mynerva: The main painting narrates the myth of Inkarrí, the last Inca killed by the Spanish colonizers. His limbs reorganize themselves around the center of his decapitated head, and from this head, roots emerge that invoke his resurgence. One of his arms squeezes a breast, from which milk flows and moistens the sterile earth. To the right, other scenes of horror appear: decapitated and broken bodies forming a great wave of flesh. Parents carry an injured child. Some of the figures below try to bury their dead, while others organize food supplies made up of corn grains.
As part of the installation, in front of the central painting hang scraps of fabric stitched together like skin sutures. Inside them, I began thinking about a body/seed that keeps growing until it becomes a mixture of plants and animals.
I chose this myth because it can explain the tragedy of what any scorched land means: the destruction born from human corruption, from the desire to wipe everything out and leave behind only bleeding bodies as landscape. But I also tried to represent the hope of bringing life back to what appears completely inert. From the perspective of Indigenous resistance, the myth sustains the idea that a body may die, but a collective struggle never can.
Wynnie Mynerva: ‘Volveré y seré millones,’ 2026, installation view at Société Berlin // Courtesy the artist, Société, Berlin and Gathering London / Ibiza, photo by Trevor Good
CET: The show emerges from three very specific catalysts: the violence in the Middle East, Berlin’s reputation as a city of sexual liberation and your own experience of migration and legalization in Europe. What made these three concerns feel essential to tie into a single exhibition?
WM: The question I was trying to respond to was how life is sustained in such violent times. I was thinking about those different aspects that today seem to constantly intersect: the normalization of mass crimes, organized hatred, xenophobia, the permanent production of fear, and the fact that it is always possible to move backward. I was also thinking about how the freedoms we believe we have gained can sedate us in the face of what happens outside our privileges, until we reach this point in history where impunity reigns.
Wynnie Mynerva: ‘Volveré y seré millones,’ 2026, installation view at Société Berlin // Courtesy the artist, Société, Berlin and Gathering London / Ibiza, photo by Trevor Good
Wynnie Mynerva: ‘Volveré y seré millones,’ 2026, installation view at Société Berlin // Courtesy the artist, Société, Berlin and Gathering London / Ibiza, photo by Trevor Good
CET: The video work ‘El amor en tiempos de colonialismo’ traces marriages between migrants—relationships that operate on care and urgency, rather than romance. Why did you decide that this form of attachment was something that your work needed to address directly?
WM: I’m interested in investigating illegal practices because, for me, they are one of the few remaining spaces from which it is still possible to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world; in this specific case, [it was] more compassionate ways of relating to one another.
Recently, I heard Rita Segato speak about the strategies for changing the course of history. She said that since the French Revolution, we have believed that change would come through taking control of the State, and yet nothing has really changed. And that politics is not limited only to institutions, but is also found in our everyday decisions.
In this particular case, it is about the protection of life here and now; that means making our ways of loving, sustaining one another and enduring into a weapon. In that sense, I propose putting this form of love on the table: a deeply political love, one that involves surrendering our privileges in order to support the life projects of others.
Wynnie Mynerva: ‘El Amor en los tiempos de colonialismo,’ 2026, video, duration: 6 min 34 sec // Courtesy the artist, Société, Berlin and Gathering London / Ibiza
CET: You’ve been living between Berlin and Barcelona, far from Peru, but the exhibition is described as a “return home” to Andean thought. What does it mean to return to a cosmology rather than a place?
WM: Returning home means reconnecting with my parents’ Andes, but also with the familiarity of the arid desert sands of Lima where I grew up. I’m always asking myself what I’m doing here and where my people are. For anyone who migrates and has had to renounce their language, their landscape and their affections, what one must never renounce is the ability to build from one’s own place of enunciation and from one’s capacity for self-determination.
Each person resists, but from their own place. Because cosmology is our way of understanding the world, and this world is not a safe place, it is urgent that our capacity to imagine other possible worlds does not become exhausted.
Exhibition Info
Société
Wynnie Mynerva: ‘Volveré y seré millones’
Exhibition: May 1-June 27, 2026
societeberlin.com
Wielandstraße 26, 10707 Berlin, click here for map
