Guatemala Después: Rethinking the Past, Reimagining the Now

“The past is always ahead of me“, says Benvenuto Chavajay, a Mayan artist from Guatemala, reminding us that our experience of the past shapes the present and draws us into the future. Chavajay’s words invite us to rethink our relationship to notions of time, official histories, oblivion and collective memory. Following 36 years of internal armed conflict fueled by U.S.-backed military regime(s) and a state of perpetual colonialism, Guatemala seems paralyzed in the midst of a fragile democracy and a volatile economy. Nevertheless, over the past two decades, artists, thinkers and socially engaged practitioners in the Central American nation have developed inventive new spaces, collectives and resourceful practices.

Guatemala Después is a collaborative curatorial project that seeks to showcase artistic practices that reclaim suspended histories, resurface invisible injustices, and engage in dialogues that relocate our imagination of the present. As a platform for investigation and presentation, it seeks to demonstrate a complex and polyphonic notion of Guatemala today by expanding the spaces for the coexistence of fragmentary narratives, dissident voices, and other epistemologies. How do we understand Guatemala hereafter?

Faculty and students at The New School began collaborating with Ciudad de la Imaginación, embarking on a yearlong process of co-investigation, fieldwork, interviews, workshops and an open call for proposals from artists in and outside of Guatemala. The result of this process is more than an exhibition organizing artistic objects; rather, it is a laboratory for creative inquiry, trans-disciplinary thinking, and collaborative knowledge production.

This first iteration of the exhibition, on view at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons, will be followed by another edition at Ciudad de la Imaginación in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala in June 2015.

Each exhibition showcases a collective set of artistic investigations by 10-12 multidisciplinary teams of nearly 40 artists, social scientists, and community activists, among others. Students at The New School have been conducting parallel investigations and artistic gestures, while supporting the production of many of these works.

The artist collaboratives participating in the show include:

The artist collaboratives participating in the show include:

- Vida y Memoria (Rogelio Can Gómez, Edgar Esquit, Beatriz Cortéz, and Víctor Hugo Ajquejay);

- Justa memoria (Emmanuel Yac, Reyna Marisol Pérez Calderón, Josué Caleb Mendoza Camey, and Jesús Hernández);

- Puntos co-existentes (Jorge de León, Nora Pérez, and Gerardo del Valle);

- Placeres Subterráneos (Franco Arocha and Claudia Molina);

- Memoria, historia en disputa (Flor de María Calderón Pérez, Francisco Sánchez, Daniel Xocop, Dulce Cabrera, Josué Abdias Otzoy Juvilajuj, and Sandy Hernández);

- Sitio-Seña (Quique Lee, Iris Castillo, Andrea Monroy, and Paulo Chang);

- Hipnosis (Regina José Galindo and Alfredo Ceibal);

- ¿Me escuchas? (Jessica Kairé and Daniel Perera);

- La metamorfosis de la devaluación(Fernando Poyón, Angel Poyón, Angélica Lorenzo, and María Jacinta Xón);

- ¿Guatemala después? (Madelyn González, Jhonathan Gómez, and Jenny Dale);

 -El olvido que no sabe que es olvido (Yasmin Hage, Alejandro Flores, and Camilo A. Luin); and

- Saturno: año 174 (Julio Serrano, Enrique Pazos, Julie Grajeda, and Irene Martínez).

Many of the aesthetic traces and tactics employed by these projects are influenced by a generation of established Guatemalan artists such as Aníbal López, Jorge De León, Regina José Galindo, Benvenuto Chavajay, Sandra Monterroso, Reyes Josué Morales, and Daniel Hernández-Salazar, who have examined notions of memory, violence and indigeneity in their own work. The exhibit will showcase a selection of compelling works from these “reference artists” through photography, video, and installation pieces.

Chirmol is a Guatemalan sauce made from smashed roasted tomatoes and spicy peppers; in oral culture to say chirmol is to speak about something chaotic, convoluted and complex, but which simply tastes delicious. The transnational collaboration between The New School and Ciudad de la Imaginación has turned into a “chirmol” of artistic energies and curatorial perspectives, reframing memory and the performance of urban agency while situating indigeneity and otherness, as reflected in Guatemala Después. We invite you to participate in this creative inquiry and make your own chirmol along the way.