Misfortune [1] Barrer, July 24, 2007, Centro de la Imagen. 28 de Julio Avenue, Miraflores, Lima. In an express preamble to Alan García Pérez's report to the Congress of the Republic on July 28 and to the anniversary of the CVR's Final Report at the end of August.

In Barrer, I offer my own blood, shedding it in respectful commemoration of the 70,000 deaths that occurred during the internal armed conflict at the hands of criminals, both insurgent terrorism and state terrorism; violent outpourings that we seek to keep forgotten and that are thus remembered, through a rather loving outpouring.

Then, assuming the roles of big business, the decision-makers and influencers of state policies, and the media entrepreneurs, primarily, though not exclusively, I sweep, with broom in hand, the spilled blood—which is now no longer mine but everyone's—under a carpet that, with the face of Alan García, futilely attempts to hide what cannot be hidden. The carpet, bloodstained, like our state and the hands of many of us, reveals on the back the face of Alberto Fujimori.

The chants of the APRA and Fujimorista advertising slogans, "Respects keep respects" and "We never had the opportunity, now we have the opportunity," allude to the fact that Fujimontesinism and Alanmantillism are and always have been two sides of the same coin with which we charge and pay daily: that of disrespect for many Peruvians who are not truly considered citizens, and that of our complicity in impunity.

Infortunio Barrer has been alluded to in the Conference—performance Infortunio (or the ways in which "performans" is shit), Heterotopías Colloquium, UAM, Mexico City, October 20, 2016).

[1] Taking as a background the notion constructed by John Austin from the philosophy of language (in his lectures edited under the title How to Do Things with Words in 1939), I propose to formalize the use, in the contemporary artistic field, of the term "misfortune" to generically designate creations that, while pretending to be performative or announcing themselves as performances, fail in the attempt to establish the collective meaning that a performance implies, or are in reality discursive symbolizations or mere representational semantizations. When it comes to failures, misfortunes can occur, always following Austin, due to impertinence (misfortunes due to bad appeal or bad application in Austin), due to inefficiency (in Austin, misfortunes of a flawed act or an unfinished act), or due to inauthenticity (misfortunes of an insincere act or an empty act, in Austin's terms). When it comes to symbolizations or semantizations without performative pretension, we are faced with what Austin calls a constative statement, only if they are announced as performances, misfortune arises from an unfortunate totality, since nothing is really intended to be established (the performer seeks to express his thought, his sensitivity, etc., to tell a story, to present a discourse, to stage a dramaturgy, a choreography, a design of bodily activity, etc.).
In Barrer's case, we are faced with a misfortune of inauthenticity because although we intended to establish a performance, as I was able to verify later in dialogues with almost all the direct participants, they had decided to omit from their memory, in an eloquent denial of the entire meaning of what was intended to be performed, the fragment "their blood," which was repeated thirty-three times within the complete phrase "their blood, your blood, my blood." There was an insincere act in the minds of the participants, in which their minds resisted the establishment of communitas with the victims of violence. Nothing had been performed.