The Tender Archive

by Mariana Rodríguez Barreno

A quiet yet insistent rhythm runs through our everyday existence: the tender act of seeing and being seen. This mutual gaze not only informs how we carry ourselves—both in the intimacy of private life and in the exposure of public space—but also shapes the fragile archives we build through images, memories, and gestures. In a culture saturated with surveillance and spectacle, our visual selves are constantly assembled, dismantled, and reassembled. But how deeply do we attend to what passes before our eyes? What does it mean to look, to be looked at, and to hold those impressions in return? These questions pulse through the practice of Alejandra Morote Peralta (b. 1990), anchoring her exploration of perception, memory, and the delicate traces that bind them.

There is something obsessive in the act of observation. Morote Peralta’s work brings attention to the intensity of our gaze—especially the one we direct toward particular subjects. Among them, beauty and the body occupy a privileged space. In her early pieces, such as Natural and Going to a Funeral (both 2015), several women address a virtual audience with performative guidance on beauty in both common and exceptional situations. Natural dwells on the strangeness of a word that implies authenticity in a context where almost nothing is truly “natural”—especially in relation to the ways women are taught to manipulate and make up their own bodies. This interest returns in The Stimulator (2025), a visual publication that questions how technological devices—advertised as healers of every physical ailment—distance us from experiencing our own bodies and their failures firsthand. In contrast, Going to a Funeral 101 reveals how online tutorials, far from being merely superficial, can become communal spaces to share experiences such as grief and loss.

A central question emerges from these visual displays: what happens when we encounter our own image on display? In Mirror Surveillance (2018), the fear and discomfort of facing a video camera transform recording into an uncanny act. The camera appears almost sentient—a living machine capable of intruding upon our private selves. Morote Peralta’s investigations extend to how the human body behaves under implicit observation. In Ay Papi (2021), the silent gaze that watches a model dancing to perreo becomes a way to explore how intimacy, once mediated by the screen, enters the public domain. Through such works, Morote Peralta suggests that spectators are granted access to others’ inner worlds—worlds that circulate freely within virtual networks, social media, and websites. Her work gathers from this archive of moving images to reflect on how cultural and social dynamics are expressed and altered.

This enquiry is visible in recent projects such as Todo está bien (2024) and Checan Moche (2025), both of which take the form of printed visual narratives. In Todo está bien, a lyrical text written by the artist is paired with images sourced from surveillance footage. This pairing awaits completion by the reader, inviting interpretation and emotional layering. In Checan Moche, Morote Peralta investigates how erotic Moche ceramics from ancient Peru are received in a society that is less conservative but increasingly spectacularizing. The project explores how these images resurface with renewed cultural power, exposing the tension between heritage, desire, and commodification. This last project is certainly influenced by her upbringing in Peru.

Morote Peralta also inscribes herself into this visual archive. Her experience as a woman is rendered through images, revealing how visuality is inescapable in the construction of identity. In Grandma Q&A (2019), she interrogates her grandmother’s image and, with it, the natural loss brought by time. Her earliest memories are also mediated through video—introduced as a little girl to her aunts abroad via a VHS tape, which served both as evidence of her existence and as an emotional bridge. This personal memory unfolds alongside a historic one: the 1992 capture of Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Shining Path, in Your Aunts Don’t Know You Exist (2015). In Aliento de virgen (2023), Morote Peralta decodes family myths through intimate lyrical fragments that reflect on the small lies and inherited fictions that shape a young girl’s relationship to her body and her world.

What Alejandra Morote Peralta offers us is a tender archive—one not kept in drawers or vaults, but etched in repetition, in silent frames, in the uneasy stillness of a camera’s gaze. These images do not merely document; they breathe. They hover between the personal and the collective, between forgetting and remembering. In them, observation becomes a form of intimacy—an act of care, of reaching across distance, even if at times its exercise can lead us to strange places. Morote Peralta’s work reminds us that to see and to be seen is to risk tenderness: to open ourselves to the subtle electricity that pulses between our image and another’s eye. Through this visual weave, she proposes that memory does not rest—it recurs, it lingers, it aches softly. And perhaps, in that ache, we find a shared place to dwell.