By: María Laura Hernández de Agüero
The Inca Garcilaso Cultural Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs presents the exhibition “Varguitas, The Truth of Lies”, a moving visual journey through the life and work of Mario Vargas Llosa, based on images from his family albums and from the photographic archive of his daughter, photographer Morgana Vargas Llosa.
Morgana accompanied her father to various countries, capturing with her camera images that later illustrated novels, essays, and journalistic articles. She explains: “For my father, writing was not always a solitary act. Behind each novel there was a search, a vital impulse to understand a place, a character, a story. And many times, that search led us to travel together. We went to French Polynesia, Brittany, Bordeaux, and Arequipa following the traces of Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán. We traveled by road to northern Peru to locate the origins of a central character in I Give You My Silence. It was his way of immersing himself in reality to nourish his fictions and construct a ‘true lie.’”
For Alejandro Castellote, curator of the exhibition, the mosaic that opens the show seeks to bring us closer to the context surrounding the intense life of a writer of universal stature: his transition from childhood to youth and from youth to adulthood, his travels, the awards he received, his brief political career, his countless friendships, and above all, his family. Morgana accompanied her father to Israel, Palestine, and Iraq in search of real stories that later became journalistic reports. The writer had an insatiable curiosity to better understand the world we live in, a curiosity that stemmed, in part, from his journalistic vocation. “I always remember him with a notebook in hand, writing tirelessly. I followed him with my camera, trying to capture what he would later turn into words. This is a testament to our shared work, to the times we stopped being just father and daughter and also became companions in travel and in our profession,” she concludes.
The exhibition can be visited until April 12, 2026, from Tuesday to Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.