The Many Portraits of Juan José Cabezudo
From Watercolour to Chatbot
Juan José Cabezudo (c
What survives of marginalized memories like Juan José Cabezudo's when young people ask an AI directly, without the sources and institutions that once contextualized his image? And what should they know before they trust the answer?
For many young people, a chatbot is now the first point of contact with the past. Lives like Cabezudo's (Black, queer and working-class) entered the record only through other people's eyes, and each of those portraits carried its maker's bias. Historical images can still be questioned: they have an author, a date, a caption. A chatbot's answer has none, and it can change from one question to the next. By moving from historical visual representations to contemporary algorithmic representation, the project raises a warning without demonizing the technology: chatbots, like the painters before them, carry Cabezudo's memory forward, but never neutrally. The goal is to give young audiences, especially young LGBTQ+ people, the tools to ask who made the portrait they are looking at, including when it comes from a chatbot.
Portraits in conversation
The available author-supplied project visuals are shown here. The social-media carousel is not reproduced in full unless the original slide files are available.
Portraits are interpretations
Juan José Cabezudo, an Afro-Peruvian cook associated with early republican Lima, appears in a series of historical and contemporary visual representations. The project examines who made those portraits, who viewed them, and how each representation shaped the public memory of a person.
From watercolour to photography
The visual record includes the watercolours of Francisco Javier Cortés and Pancho Fierro and later photographic and archival representations. These images are historical sources: they can preserve traces of a life, but they also reflect the interests, conventions and assumptions of their makers.
From archival image to chatbot
A contemporary social-media carousel brings historical portraits into dialogue with queer memory work and the ways chatbots answer questions about the past. Its central problem is not simply which portrait is most recognisable, but who is authorised to construct a portrait in the first place.
Sources & Credits
Original project references, visual sources and creator credits are collected here in one place.
- Creator & project
Laura Guien, Roland Alvarez Chavez, Elena Hernandez Camero. Social-media storytelling project, Critical digital intervention. Who Owns Memory? Digital Public Exhibition, First Cycle 2026.
– Francisco Javier Cortés, Juan José Cabezudo y un amigo, watercolor, ca. 1827. Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Public domain. – Francisco Javier Cortés, Comesuelas, watercolor, inscribed "Juan José Comesuelas, maricón principal (1827)". MALI, Public domain. – – Pancho Fierro, watercolor captioned "Ño Juan José Cabezudo (a) El maricon", 19th century. Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Lima. Public domain. – Pancho Fierro, watercolor captioned "El maricon Juan José (1860)". Pinacoteca Municipal Ignacio Merino, Lima. Public domain. – Courret studio, El vivandero Ño Juan José, 1860s. Archivo Courret, Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. Public domain.
Secondary literature: - Alegre Henderson, Magally. Androginópolis: Dissident Masculinities and the Creation of Republican Peru (Lima, 1790–1850). PhD dissertation, Stony Brook University, 2012. - Buenazo. "El cocinero más famoso de la independencia: Juan José Cabezudo". 22 July 2021. https://buenazo.pe/notas/2021/07/22/cocinero-famoso-independencia-juan-jose-cabezudo-425 (accessed 5 October 2026). - Majluf, Natalia. "Desborde y contención: imágenes y modernización en Lima, 1861-1865". Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 47, no. 127 (2025). https://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext_plus&pid=S0185-12762025000200187 (accessed 5 October 2026). - Majluf, Natalia. "La imagen 'queer' de Lima en el siglo XIX". Historias.pe, n.d. https://historias.pe/historias/detalle/56 (accessed 5 October 2026). - Making Queer History. "Juan José Cabezudo". 30 May 2026. https://www.makingqueerhistory.com/articles/2026/5/30/juan-jose-cabezudo (accessed 5 October 2026). - Mori Julca, Jason E. "Archivo fotográfico Courret de la Biblioteca Nacional de Perú". E-LIS repository, n.d. http://eprints.rclis.org/8560/1/courret_peru.pdf (accessed 5 October 2026).
Contemporary memory work - Alvarez, Roland, Vero Ferrari and Carlos Jaramillo. Estampas maricas de Lima. Illustrations by Mario Ríos. Lima: Editorial Gafas Moradas, 2023. ISBN 978-612-5058-15-7. Illustration of Cabezudo reproduced with permission of the publisher and the illustrator. - Álvarez Chávez, Roland. "'Estampas maricas de Lima'. Un ejercicio de recuperación y reconstrucción de la memoria desde las propias voces de la disidencia sexual". MariCorners: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares LGTBIA+ y Queer 1, no. 1 (2024): 11–40. https://doi.org/10.24197/mcreilq.1.2024.11-40
- Visual and media material
Photographs, documents, illustrations, video and audio are attributed through the project text, captions and contributor documentation wherever that information was supplied. This exhibition page does not grant additional reuse permissions.
- Digital exhibition edition
Web presentation adapted for Who Owns Memory? (2026), with layout and language editing. The original contributors retain authorship of their research, interpretation and creative work.