Guatemala’s Paiz Art Biennial considers language’s power and limitations in addressing violence

On the coronary heart of the XXIII Paiz Artwork Biennial in Guatemala is the query of how language manifests bodily in our our bodies and upon the atmosphere. Titled Bebí palabras sumergidas en sueños (I drank phrases immersed in desires), the twenty third version of the biennial, which payments itself as the most important up to date artwork exhibition in Central America, brings collectively 30 artists and collectives who discover concepts of translation and interpretation—of desires, territories, our bodies and motion. Its title comes from a line in Nací mujer (I used to be born a lady), a poem by the Guatemalan author Maya Cú.

The exhibition is a feminist and intersectional mission, foregrounding the connection between weak and often-marginalised our bodies and the earth. Many works hyperlink language, race and sophistication via totally different durations of pressured migration resulting from slavery, assaults towards Indigenous communities and shifting territorial claims. Past inventive and theoretical examinations of those types of violence, a number of works suggest sensible methods for therapeutic trauma brought on by gender-based violence and ecological extraction.

The biennial is happening in Guatemala Metropolis and Antigua, spanning 5 venues: the Centro Cultural de España, Centro Cultural Municipal Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen, Portal de la Sexta, the Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española and La Nueva Fábrica. For its co-organisers, unbiased curator Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig and Museo de Arte Contemporeaño Panama chief curator Juan Canela, the exhibition is a chance to current a “polyphony of voices”, an strategy exemplified by a collaboration with educator Esperanza de León to organise a cultural convening to seek the advice of on the exhibition. This cohort consists totally of artists—Minia Biabiany, Marilyn Boror Bor, Duen Neka’hen Sacchi and Juana Valdés—whose works are additionally featured within the exhibition. The work of Indigenous collectives, artists chosen from an open name and 5 historic ladies artists—Margarita Azurdia, Ana Mendieta, Fina Miralles, María Thereza Negreiros and Cecilia Vicuña—are additionally included.

These 5 historic revolutionary artists’ works from the Sixties and 70s opened up new channels for feminist desirous about our bodies and ecologies, offering components of a conceptual framework for the biennial as an entire. At a time when predominantly white, male Land artists had been gaining notoriety for large-scale and everlasting interventions into the panorama, these artists took a particularly female and private strategy. Within the collection of pictures L’arbre (1975), Miralles, a Spanish conceptual artist, submerges her physique within the soil of her native Catalonia to poetically underline the connection between people and the earth, each varieties of natural matter.

For the late Cuban American artist Mendieta, artwork was a option to “grow to be one with the earth [to] grow to be an extension of nature and nature becom[ing] an extension of [her] physique”, as a lot because it was a way to re-establish a bond with Cuba, her birthplace. In her Silueta (Silhouette) (Seventies) collection of pictures and Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Rock coronary heart with blood) (1975) video on view, Mendieta traces the define of her silhouette upon the earth—in rocks, mud, water, blood and flowers, amongst different supplies.

That communion between the human physique and the earth, plus preoccupations with belonging and transformation, persist as we speak within the work of Colectivo Ixqcrear, a Guatemalan collective created by Q’eqchi’ Maya ladies and composed of sisters Ixmukane and Ixmayab’ Quib Caal and their aunt Elena Caal Hub. Of their video La fuerza que emancipa al cuerpo (The drive that emancipates the physique) (2022), a lady sleeps in clay, personifying pepem ixq (butterfly lady), the spirit of all subjugated ladies. Pepem ixq is awoken by the voices of emancipated ladies and subsequently arises, clothes and meets the ladies who supported her, an intergenerational group impressed by the collective members’ mom and grandmother, who survived gender-based and colonial violence.

Within the textual content Mi abuela Juana (From my grandmother Juana) by indigenous Kaqchikel Maya artist Marilyn Boror Bor and author Jimena Pons Ganddini, they equally mark a generational sharing of information, writing: “one thing in my grandmother’s gesture and in the way in which the hearth respects her give me the impression that… she was cast from earth and hearth; that’s why she carries maps on her pores and skin as a result of she is information, reminiscence and pure territory”.

The Panamanian artist Risseth Yangüez Singh explores the notion of intergenerational mapping in Panamáfrica (2023), a textile work made in collaboration along with her grandmother that exhibits the map of Panama. Created from braided hair and shells, the work marks locations with African names and their derivations within the territory. The work is introduced with the video efficiency Hacerme un capullo (Make myself a cocoon) (2023), through which Singh, with the assistance of shut mates, braids herself right into a cocoon of hair as a communal and meditative act of care utilizing a politicised, natural materials. The curators observe the musical high quality of this gesture, explaining that Singh “query[s] her expertise as a Black lady, drawing new strains, like sheet music in her hair”.

Within the Guatemalan artist Carolina Alvarado’s set up Comen poemas mojados en leche, uno dos tres gatos (They eat poets soaked in milk, one two three cats) (2023), voices are made manifest. Working with ladies at Casa Refugiados, an organisation that helps refugees in Mexico Metropolis, she has constructed a white tree of branches with embroidered components cascading down as roots. Impressed by a poem of the identical identify that’s recited in Spanish, English, French and Quiché (the language of the Kʼicheʼ Maya), the work connects latest poetry with components of the Mayan worldview current within the Popol Vuh, a foundational sacred textual content for the Kʼicheʼ folks, to honour the reminiscence of writers and poets assassinated throughout the Guatemalan Civil Warfare (1960-96). As a lot as Alvarado’s set up is about estrangement and the violence that may be finished to a physique by a state and society, it’s guided by a perception in a common connectivity, a “rhythm” that the curators establish as setting a tempo for your entire exhibition.

At a gap press convention, Birbragher-Rozencwaig and Canela framed their biennial as an invite for dialogue and to get together, a provocation that was supported by the inaugural ceremony organised by Colectivo Tz’aqol. Led by Victor Manuel Barillas and Marta Guadalupe Tuyuc Us, the collective facilitates theatre and therapeutic workshops from the angle of a Mayan worldview. Solik/Desatar (Solik/Tie off) (2022) is a monologue that chronicles a younger lady’s every day life, rape and subsequent cycles of trauma. As a type of communal therapeutic, attendees had been invited to actively be part of the ceremony and throw candles into a fireplace, be part of fingers, lean on the backs of fellow attendees and strangers, and at last dance. On this presentation—as in lots of different works within the XXIII Paiz Artwork Biennial, tactile and corporeal gestures function as languages between and past phrases.

XXIII Paiz Artwork Biennial, till 30 July, numerous venues, Guatemala Metropolis and Antigua, Guatemala. Displays at Centro Cultural de España and the Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española in Guatemala Metropolis, and at La Nueva Fábrica in Antigua, might be open till 30 September