Mariana Destro's 'Guaraná Paquera' Explores Digital Identity Through Instagram Performance

Brazilian artist Mariana Destro has created the multimedia project 'Guaraná Paquera,' which examines the boundaries between truth and fiction in digital spaces. The work originated from Destro's personal experience undergoing facial plastic surgery in 2023 after relocating from Brasília to Rio de Janeiro. Throughout that year, she performed a fictionalized version of her life by posting carefully curated images to her Instagram Stories, blending photography, performance, and digital media. The project evolved through multiple formats: beginning as a master's research performance, expanding to a website with a Web 1.0 aesthetic, developing into an academic dissertation, and culminating in a photobook published in late 2025 by zero-Edições. Destro's work investigates themes of femininity, sexuality, relationships, family, abuse, and the construction of female identity in the internet era. In an interview with Gabryella Roque and Laura Sapucaia, Destro discussed how her feminist perspective and academic background at the University of Brasília (UnB) informed her artistic practice. She explained that the project explores how technology and social media enable identity reconstruction, while also critiquing normative beauty standards and the labor involved in performing femininity. The photobook features approximately 150 images selected from over 400 originally posted online, organized into three narrative acts that resemble cinematic structure. Destro is currently pursuing doctoral research titled 'Pornothésis,' examining connections between digital self-representation and Hollywood's star system.