​Portals of the Unruly Body is a visceral, durational performance work exploring personal experiences of cancer, chronic illness, and pain through movement, voice, and gestural mark-making. The red fabric, a symbol of women's vital life force and of blood cancer itself,  becomes both material and metaphor, embodying surrender, resistance, and reclamation.

 

Through a feminist lens, Valdiviezo confronts societal and internalized narratives of disability and otherness, challenging the viewer to witness the negotiation of body barriers and the politics of disposability. Her chemotherapy-intervened body becomes the site of inquiry — poetic and defiant — reflecting on gender identity, trauma, repression, and liberation. As a self-taught performer, Valdiviezo claims agency and authorship over movement itself, rejecting ideals of perfection in favor of raw, improvisational, and unmediated expression.

 

Rooted in the lineage of Butoh, Pina Bausch, Marina Abramović, and Violeta Luna, this ongoing work transforms gesture into a meditation on autonomy and power, staging the sacred feminine as an act of resistance.​​​​