Emperatriz Plácido San Martín’s work exalts sacred instances of life and invites us to feel its strength and perhaps its call. Devoted to fearing death since our earliest and most Catholic childhood, we have become excellent conjurers of terrible emotions whenever crisis, loss or illness take something away from us; and yet we survive daily thanks to death and with the death of all that we have consumed to nourish and fill us with its energy. We survive on the mortal ruins of other peoples who had to die for all their descendants to be here today. We survive one more day in the midst of a whole chain of plundering and extractions that to some does not take anything directly from us but the cost is still being paid with their lives by someone less privileged than us in some other corner of Peru, and that too is the absolute regency of death.