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BOXES beyond borders

Tag: Guatemala

In Memoriam

For many years, Guatemala has seen itself drained of its blood.  The survivors of the war have become like witnesses who will be able to tell the different violence-ridden anecdotes and facts so that such events may never return to repeat themselves.  And the dead, as silent witnesses who will attest to the importance of regenerating the earth and hope.  With their ashes they will free our memory.

Specifically, in this little box, I have deposited the ashes of a dear Mexican friend who, with passion and solidarity, lives with us the repressive and depressing situation of the early nineties in our  country.

In thinking about the dead that the war left behind, and the friend who shared the hope and hopelessness of the Guatemalan creators, this box comes to be a metaphor of all those situations where tenderness and pain appear with the same intensity.

 

Rhino Blues

Man, always satisfying his external passions, has no compassion regarding the sovereignty of our land, devastating, polluting, annihilating.  His only urge is to satisfy the emptiness of his soul, feeding it with all sorts of possessions and pleasures, little by little forgetting the search in his spirit for answers.

The fauna and flora die at his feet, dedicating their horns, nails, and bones to unending sexual gluttony.  Thousands and thousands of little seahorses, tigers, and rhinoceroses disappear from the planet becoming powder and potions that man will later use to ingest and, as a result, feel manly, virile, or fertile psychologically.

These three blue horns represent nostalgia of the rhinoceros at the feet of man.  They are the ghosts that circulate his bed after he, man, has proven his virile fortitude once again.

 

Portrait of an Artist as a Box

A box is a metaphor for open and closed, the inside and the outside, two terms upon which alienation is founded. My work becomes at once the physical and the psychological space in which I face the alienation brought on by the play of dichotomies that hinder the search for identity and the possibility of its realization. The box becomes the self, inside-outside.  The nails are symbolic of manly attire with weapon, the nail as phallus, the nail as material nature, the nail as primitive ancestral device, and also as the piercing eye.  Finally, the wall of nails echoes the brutality of our surroundings.

Inside, the place of the jewel, the vagina: we find but broken glass in a sky-like space: My innards can be broken, my psyche raped by the conqueror, the violent, the oppressor,  but the immensity of my mind remains untouched.

Eva’s Last Wish

“33 years old, 33 kilos; that’s it. Listen Sara, this is an order, because I am going to die, afterwards they will call you to get me ready. You will take away this wishy washy red that I am wearing, and you will replace it with the transparent Queen of Diamonds that you bought for me yesterday, the one from Revlon.”

These were the last words of Eva Perón to Sara Gatti, who used to take care of her hands.

I combined three elements in this box:

• Cards we all play with. The most elegant queen on the deck, surrounded by a special touch of distinction: diamonds.
• As a metaphor of adherent beauty, I have interpreted acrylic nails shops, which are very popular in Guatemala nowadays.
• Evita is the heroine, the saint, the prostitute, a character that still touches many a heart.

Queen of diamonds. An embalmed body with painted fingernails. Symbol of a moment in which she took care of history. Every story has had an Evita, a woman who rules, loves, orders, and rouses from her fingernails, the power of her own world, her own story, her own time.

Evas, to the end; queens, not forever.

New Apple, New Manifesto

For a long time, the apple has been a metaphor of the female’s voice, of Eve’s voice, the voice that carried Adam to the supposed sin and expulsion from paradise. Woman has endured this sinful story for centuries. The same tale is connected to the traditional story of Pandora’s Box. Pandora’s curiosity leads her to open a box that the gods have forbidden. Her sentence is to find within all the evils of the world.

However, in this apple I present a new voice, one of many women who fight for their dignity. It is placed upon a stand and framed as an homage to the women who in the Asia, Africa, Europe, etc. struggle against practices that have put them in positions that are submissive, second class, and at times inhumane.

This new apple is a new manifesto, that of the creative woman who has had to fight for her space and had to change old meanings.

Basta Ya!

We are living in a society where violence and abuse are everyday words. We read it in the papers, we see it in the news, and in one way or the other we have been victims of it.

On May 9, 1997, a group of mothers “Las Madres Angustiadas” and other people joined in front of the Supreme Court of Justice of Guatemala, where thousands of candles “veladoras” forming the words BASTA YA! (Enough) were lit, asking for a solution to this problem.

My box unifies all those lit candles in the churches, in the small private spaces and those lit in front of the Supreme Court.