Sacrilegious acts: performing heresy and the political-spiritual

This article explores the intersection of performance, spirituality, and political resistance in the work of contemporary queer and gender- nonconforming Latin American artists of color. Focusing on performances by Lechedevirgen and Roberta Nascimento, I examine how artists appropriate and transform Catholic rituals, symbols, and imaginaries through embodied acts of sacrilege. I propose the concept of “performing heresy” to describe these interventions: practices that inhabit, twist, and reconfigure religious forms from within, challenging institutional religious authority while opening other possibilities for spiritual experience. Building on my concept of “spiritual archives,” I argue that these performances activate ancestral and affective forms of knowledge suppressed or rendered illegible by colonial religious regimes. Through exorcism, ritual, eroticism, and spiritual reappropriation, Lechedevirgen and Nascimento transform the body into a site of political-spiritual resistance, erotic sovereignty, and queer futurity. Their sacrilegious acts reclaim access to the sacred beyond institutional regulation, allowing performance to become a space for spiritual remembrance, embodied knowledge, pleasure, and collective transformation.