Listen to Our Muertos—Emperetriz Plácido San Martín

Emperatriz Plácido San Martín is an artist, activist, writer, and tattooist based in Lima, Peru and Brussels, Belgium. She works across word and image, and her practice is deeply autobiographical—a living expression of her devotion to Santa Muerte, the “Saint of Death,” a figure known to provide health and healing in the face of precarity and dispossession. Guided by her faith, San Martín creates portals of spiritual abundance and transformation—still lifes of skulls and candles become altars for everyday prayer, portraits of loved ones are fashioned into amulets for protection. Landscapes of rivers, rainbows, mountains, and oceans imagine elemental transcendence. 

 On a quiet Wednesday morning, Emperatriz and I left Lima together, boarding a two‑hour bus north to Chancay, the small coastal city where her maternal family is from. We went straight to visit her grandparents and great-grandparents at the cemetery. We played music while decorating their graves with flowers and offerings. Afterward, we recorded this interview in Spanish while sitting beneath the afternoon sun at her family’s burial plot. We spoke about her familial connection to syncretic spiritual practices and brujeriá, about the relationship between fear and erasure, faith and resistance—about living in the present with Death and reincarnation. 

Camila Palomino: How should we start? I think maybe we should first say where we are. 

Emperatriz Plácido San Martín: We’re sitting in a cemetery in Chancay, a city along the road that connects Lima to the north of Peru. We arrived very early, on a very cloudy day. When we got to the cemetery, the sky was clear, and now the sun is here, too. We’re sitting at the graves of my grandparents and great‑grandparents, which have this little patch of synthetic grass [laughter] for us to sit on and talk a little bit about death. 

Chancay is a port. There are many Afro‑descendant people here. After the supposed abolition of slavery, and at a time when guano was being harvested, there was a big migration of Chinese people who came to work. The conditions were similar to slavery, except they didn’t arrive by force, exactly. Instead, many workers were deceived to come here. So, in Chancay there’s a strong mix of Afro-descendant and Chinese peoples who met while working and formed families. This is the mestizaje I come from. It isn’t only physical—it’s cultural and spiritual, as well. It’s called “land of the brujos,” because mestizaje led to there being many religious or spiritual practices that, to this day, are still condemned because they don’t fit neatly within Catholicism. People ask us, for example, for amarres—for someone to fall in love with them. They ask us for money, for health, even to kill someone, and all that work is done with Catholic saints. In Chancay, this is widely practiced, and my great‑grandfather, Alejandro San Martín Colán, practiced it a lot—and now my uncle, who works in what he calls “esotericism,” does the same. 

CP: I’m very happy to be here with you. I’m feeling something deeply important about you and your work in a new way. I feel that, in your work, alongside Death, there are two themes that you focus on and connect: family and ritual. And I think these themes are, for you, very connected to place and territory, more than to a specific temporality. It’s so intense to be here in the presence of your grandparents and great‑grandparents, and also in Chancay, this place where your maternal family is from, while we think about your artistic practice. Especially because, in your work, many of your references are what surround us right now. In this cemetery, we’re surrounded by dunes, a big blue sky. The cemetery is filled with color, and many graves have these small landscape paintings of the roads and the shores of Chancay. 

EPSM: Yes, family is a complex theme for me. I think about my family and how they’ve taught me to heal myself since I was very young. My mother treated inflammations with llantén [broadleaf plantain]. She would give us orange blossom water to calm us down. They would pasar un huevo when we were scared. Newborns had red bracelets placed on their arm to protect them from the evil eye. On my maternal side, this was a form of resistance that I now understand as racial. I think that racism not only erases certain bodies but also the healing practices that have allowed us to live for many years. Colonialism in Peru is a project that, to this day, strips those of us who don’t fit the state’s norms with our traditions, our ways of obtaining justice, and healing. They make us believe our history doesn’t exist or never existed. 

Colonization imposes heroes and gods that aren’t necessarily the deities we grew up with and that have historically blessed our families. So, I feel that creating from my familial memory and tradition is a way to continue blessing myself and trusting my heritage. To speak of racism and anti‑racism is a constant horror story. How do we cope with that pain, those losses? It is through our faith, through spirituality, brujeriá, healing with plants, and our daily rituals that we can shed the fear that eventually sickens people. So, I feel that ritual, within my work, connected to my family, is a way not only to create art but also to create moments, portals where people can travel and heal by being in contact with their muertos. 

My uncle Abel is the one who passed down brujeriá and esotericism to me, and we go to the same place to buy our herbs, candles, saints, and protections. As you know, candles have an intention according to their color. If you need power, if you’re weak—red candle. Protection—black candle. If you need tranquility, calm, or to honor someone, a white candle. If you want to ask for money, a yellow candle. The same goes for flowers—they work with the same colors. Color carries an intention that is closely linked to how our bodies relate to that color: blood, passion, life, right? The need to pulsate: Your heart is red, it pulsates, gives you life, makes you desire things. Blue is the sky, the sea, the unattainable—it makes you dream. You see clouds in the sky and you imagine things. You try to see little birds. You try to see sheep. It’s the emotional world: water, cold—blue. Emotions are illnesses—health. If you’re sad, you get sick. If you’re happy, you heal. Who hasn’t felt sick and then gone dancing? They had such a good time that the next day they felt fine. So, this whole symbolic relationship is deeply connected to how the environment itself is organized and moves. The symbols I use stem from that relationship with nature, and they also form a collective relationship that develops over time. 

CP: I think it’s also important that, in your work, the concept of family is expansive. In your last exhibition, Let the dead bury their dead, at Livia Benavides Gallery, you also created a chosen‑family lineage—bonds that organize and protect against fear—that I imagine also comes from your activism.

EPSM: When you grow up in a space where, on the one hand, you can be okay at times but, around you, people are experiencing needs, fear of death, of violence—it’s hard not to feel fear yourself. I understand that, for me to be here, many people around me have come together—not just supporting me with money but also with energy, intention. They have blessed me. They have prayed for me. They have asked their saints to help me, whether Catholic saints, orishas, or demons. 

When I started LGBTQI+ activism and racial‑justice work, I realized that being queer lets us build families beyond blood, and that at the end of the day … there isn’t necessarily a legacy of how much you build for others. Instead, it’s more about how one builds knowledge that is transmitted to others so they, too, can find their own path to liberation—in the face of everything that fear prevents them from doing. Fear, I feel and think, is what governs the whole body, controls the whole body, to make you feel everything is impossible. 

CP: And through your family, you came to worship Santa Muerte? 

EPSM: Actually, my family doesn’t identify themselves as worshippers, exactly, but we’ve always had a close link with cemeteries, since I was a child. My dad used to visit my grandfather every Sunday. There was a strong relationship with kissing the coffin and the grave of my grandfather. My mom did the same. I was always hearing stories about people I never met, who were dead. At the same time, this relationship made me think about what happens after you die or what reincarnation means—having all these stories and practices tied to cemeteries and to people I never knew, people who lived before me. Now I understand that … life, as I was telling you before, is all connected, and that there is reciprocity between everything, among all energies in the world, not only among humans. That’s also how I understand reincarnation and death. 

CP: What does that relationship to Santa Muerte and d​​​​eath mean for you—not only as a familial connection but also aesthetically within your work? You often use different symbols linked to death. Representing death has been a generative imagination in many cultures, yet can also be taboo, or instrumentalized as a powerful way to maintain control, enforcing authority through fear of death. How do you handle that symbolic weight and that intimate connection? 

EPSM: The title of my latest show, Let the dead bury their dead, comes from a biblical phrase, from [the Gospel of] Matthew. I would talk with my mom … and, while I was drawing, she kept talking to me about the dead. She was always talking to me about her grandmother. My mom has seen both her mothers die, and I know all those stories by heart. The familial relationship I have with Death is one of closeness. How do you integrate a person who is no longer in your life? As if that person became a saint or a guide, so that, in moments of necessity or gratitude, you can connect with them to help you understand why you’re here. It’s hard to cope with death, especially when you come from a family where the proximity to it has been so strong. Some people, because of their access to money, might not think about death, but there are those of us who have seen people die because of poverty, because of state neglect, because of hatred toward our bodies. 

How do I connect with Death in my work? Death has called me many times—when I was young, I was very afraid of Death. At 12 or 13, un muerto stuck to me. What does it mean for un muerto to stick to you? That an entity approaches you because it needs something it thinks you can give them. So, un muerto stuck to me, and I couldn’t sleep. I was scared to tell my mom, and in the middle of the night, I would go over and sleep with her. I hid under beds because I couldn’t be alone in my room; I could see the muerto. The muerto would hug me, touch me, and I was scared. It escalated so much, and when I finally told my mom, the first thing she said was, “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” She called my aunt, she performed a limpia, and they got rid of the muerto. After that, nothing similar happened again, and I learned to perform limpias on myself. This was around the same time my uncle had a “job” done on him, and un muerto was taking him. My uncle lost weight quickly, and medical exams found nothing. It wasn’t a medical issue. It was spiritual—un muerto was taking him, eating him alive. Someone had opened a corpse’s coffin and put my uncle’s photo in the cadaver’s mouth, and now el muerto was consuming him. Those stories have always accompanied me. 

At one point, I had satanist friends who gave me skulls. I came to have up to 30 skulls in the house where I lived with my dad. The house felt full of death, and after that, I became more aware of my relationship with los muertos. I can speak with the dead. I talk a lot when I’m by myself, and now I know I’m not just talking to myself, I’m talking to the dead. So, I have to be careful about what I say, when I speak, to whom I speak. Since I began to solidify my faith, I started speaking about death and bringing people closer to death because that’s what I aim to do. I want people to approach death—not to die, but to integrate and understand that, at some point, people close to them will also die, and it’s painful. It’s very hard to cope with death. It’s not easy. I feel that the most perverse thing colonization has done to us is to distance us from death and from the potential to live with our muertos. 

In an intimate way, I’ve had to lose fear of all these stories I’m sharing with you about muertos, about harms, about burials, about brujeriá. I’ve had to lose that fear, because I’ve felt it’s real. I’ve seen it. Fear, as we said, is the strongest form of control. When you’re scared, you don’t rebel against what oppresses you. 

CP: So, what does fear or terror mean to you? 

EPSM: I feel that terror makes people generate death. What do I mean by that? I feel that death is socially understood, from a colonial viewpoint, as a way to eliminate people. That’s why when you remember your muertos. They aren’t really dead, right? It’s as if they try to act like we don’t exist. A homophobic family has a gay nephew. He “dies”—meaning that no one talks about him. It’s as if he never existed. And, when they do talk about him, it’s out of fear that younger people will hear and become gay, like their uncle. Fear creates this system of death, where everything that no longer exists physically also never existed historically. Only the “good” part of the world remains. I start from there as a way of understanding that death is very cultural. For some people, it is considered eerie—for others, beautiful. Right now, we’re in this cemetery, and it’s very beautiful. There are gorgeous headstones. People leave flowers, make landscape paintings, offer gifts to their dead. People are cleaning the graves of ancestors or lovers. I feel that this has shaped a lot of what scares me and what doesn’t scare me. 

CP: And what scares you, then? 

EPSM: What scares me? Poverty scares me, suffering scares me. I think everyone fears suffering. I think everyone in the world is afraid of suffering. But I’m more scared of the possibility that people will try to erase you. I’m more scared that my grandparents’ grandchildren will forget my grandmother, Emperatriz, my grandfather, Alejandro. That racism reaches them, and they won’t have the tools to cope in the way that my family did, and that they taught me. That’s what scares me. In my work … I see death as something tender. I don’t see death as something I want to push away, but something I want to hold closer to me. I don’t want to forget my grandparents, so I hold them close to me. I talk about them, I write about them, I draw them. For me, that’s what is important. I guess it’s also unconscious, and now I can articulate it: The tenderness within death is important to me. The beauty within mortuary, funeral, mourning processes is crucial for me to feel comfortable, to be able to enjoy feeling sadness. 

I took a reading and activism workshop called La invención de las Brujas [The Invention of the Witches] with two researchers from the Latin American diaspora. One is Soy Ciguapa [Jen Rubio], and the other is Luna Exaltada [Corina]. They talked about how the invention of witches was a way to persecute racialized people and women—those who healed with herbs, who connected with their saints, spirits, and gods. Hollywood, for many years, through cinema, created supernatural terror imaginaries about zombies. But in Vodún culture, the zombie is actually a symbol of social justice. I didn’t know that. We always saw zombies as muertos that only want to eat people’s brains, but in Vodún, zombies are re‑animations of the dead seeking justice to save the lives of enslaved people. They rebel against the enslavers and kill them, so that their next generations can live the fullness, as they could not. 

Thus, there’s a strong perversion of what conjures fear and what doesn’t. That’s why people fear brujeria. Obviously, dying is a situation nobody wants. I worship Death, and I’m also scared that my mom will die, that I will die—especially now that I feel so alive. I feel that, when you connect with pleasure, with enjoyment in the small things of your liberation, there’s no turning back. Death becomes something you keep close because you’re grateful it hasn’t taken you yet. When you haven’t known happiness in that way, you fear not living what you’ve already lived. Like … I’ve already lived everything—I’ve already danced zapateo, we drank in Ayacucho, we watched Gerita [Zuasnabar’s] documentary about Flor Pucarina. We did many things that feel like … if they take me now, I’m ready. I’ll surrender to Death. 

CP: Yeah, we were together recently in Ayacucho. It was beautiful and intense, especially learning that, in Quechua, the city’s name means “corner of the dead”—which references the Battle of Ayacucho, but also echoes the recent and still‑alive wound of the armed conflict, and the centuries of violence and injustice in the Andes since colonization. Despite the pain, we saw how the city celebrates with festivals and beautiful processions, and we saw artists who transmute that pain in their art. In Ayacucho, you were organizing—together with poet and psychologist Mercedes Condori and the transfeminist collective La Chola Contravisual—a ritual‑healing space of creation from pain and grief, connecting us with nature, our childhood, and cycles of life and death.  

For you, what do you think exists after death? 

EPSM: Death isn’t an end, it’s an integration of time and energies. I feel it is the ultimate moment when you understand time. When someone dies, you see your whole life at once, and you see your life together with the person who dies. You remember a lot—you’re out on the street and go anywhere and suddenly remember what you would do with that person, there. I go to Gamarra, and I remember my dad. 

What is reincarnation? Reincarnation is every moment that I bring the dead to life within me. I feel that I die and reincarnate in another person. I talk to you, and I feel I’m making people reincarnate in me—like my grandmother. Sometimes, people tell me, “Oh, you sound like an older person!” I realized that I speak like an old woman. It’s not only me speaking. Many muertos are speaking through me. I feel, at the end, identity reinforces this whole system of death and fear. I can’t say who I am. I’m in a constant identity crisis—from my gender identity, racial identity, to my name. Because I realized I’m constantly invoking the dead. I’m another muerta. I am my grandmother, I am my grandfather. For me, reincarnation is this constant process where souls swap into different bodies. There are moments when, suddenly, someone says, “Wow, you look just like aunt so-and-so!” Then you grow up, and they say, “Now you look just like your dad!” In that moment, I feel not only that you look physically alike but also that their soul is in you. You speak like that person, you have their quirks, their gaze. I feel that’s reincarnation. The person is reincarnating in you. 

And in life, one can reincarnate. Right in front of me, people are reincarnating all the time [laughter], and that’s a way to lose a fear of death—to understand reincarnation that way. To understand that the muertos are always among us, and when I die, I’ll keep living, because someone will remember me—they’ll read this interview and say, “Wow!” 

And at night, I’ll appear and tickle their legs [laughter]. 

Camila Palomino is a curator, writer, and researcher from Queens, New York, based between New York City and Lima, Peru. Her work is invested in transregional aesthetic and political relationships between urban space and memory. Camila’s writing and interviews have been published in Art21, CURA., Mousse, and Topical Cream, and are included in exhibition catalogs such as y tus manos, montañas (CRISIS Gallery), The Gatherers (MoMA PS1), and Is it morning for you yet? (58th Carnegie International). In 2023, Camila was guest co-editor of the fifth issue of Viscose Journal, “Retail”. Currently, she is working on a long-term writing project with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.