DJ and poet Perla Zúñiga, better known as Jovendelaperla, founder of the Culpa collective and resident of MARICAS, has died at the age of 27. According to El País, she died last Sunday, July 14, “in her family home in a town in the mountains of Madrid, surrounded by her family, her friends and her partner, the Argentine poet and editor Mariano Blatt.”
As a non-binary trans person, they had played an important role in promoting queer visibility, specifically the less visible letters of the LGTBIQ+ acronym. Last year, they performed at Sónar, where they shared an emotional obituary. Jovendelaperla had frequently spoken about the cancer they were suffering from on their social networks, and also in their artistic work.
In an Instagram post, she had reported that in 2017 she had been diagnosed with a tumor called Ewing’s sarcoma, for which she had to undergo surgery and chemotherapy. She was “cured” but in 2021 it returned, and after being “cured” again and after more than 16 cycles of chemotherapy and 40 radio sessions, she put the song ‘Alguien vez’ up for sale on Bandcamp to raise funds to research said sarcoma, as it is not too common. The song had been written in 2018 and produced together with Lechuga Zafiro in 2019, resulting in a spoken-word piece about illness, death, life and sex.
Jovendelaperla has kept her sense of humor to the very end, and many of her tweets written this month prove it. On July 4, she shared: “Today I think there is life after death and I want to be a Viennese girl with short blonde hair, who makes her own homemade granola and mixes it with lots of fruit and nut creams. She wears pretty, colorful clothes and studies art.”
And just a few hours earlier he had joked about the treatment he was receiving: “Yesterday at the hospital, they gave me: 1 Lexatin, continuous morphine, 2 rescues and 1 lorazepam. My wish was simple: to be Sleeping Beauty. The result was comical: I ended up being Michael Jackson or a clumsy, asexual amoeba. I feel like in “Kitchen Nightmares,” hospital edition.”
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