Muxu'x, of Origen and Disobedience. Benvenuto Chavajay

OF ORIGEN AND DISOBEDIENCE

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muxu'x OF ORIGEN AND DISOBEDIENCE

Texts

Francisco Nájera Anabella Acevedo Pablo José Ramírez Domingo Yojcom Rocché María José Chavarría Javier Payeras Marvin García Luis Alfredo Arango Benvenuto Ch'ab'aq Jaay

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Executive Director Anabella Acevedo

Graphic Design Santiago Lucas

Administrative Director María Nieves Míguez

Publications Editor Julio Urízar

Director’s Assistant Aurora Chaj

Activities Assistant Axel Ixquiac

Financial Director Ofelia Gutiérrez

English translation Beerd Willems

Project Coordinators Zinder García/Kan Lainez Communications Coordinator Alba Carrasco

ISBN: 978-9929-668-04-1 © 2015, Ciudad de la Imaginación © de las imágenes: sus autores © de los textos: sus autores

Ciudad de la Imaginación is a Guatemalan institution that seeks to stimulate critical reflection among the community on a local and international level by way of a public agenda that includes exhibitions, laboratories, conferences, talks and educational workshops, among others. Founded in 2010, Ciudad de la Imaginación dedicates itself to promote projects in which art, social awareness, political events and culture enter into dialogue, generating spaces for debate and creation. www.ciudadimaginacion.org with the support of:

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OUR KNOWLEDGE, OUR HERITAGE for benvenuto ch.

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So, let’s come together, let’s meet.

For everybody this knowledge, our heritage.

What was given, what we have received.

This beautiful light amid the splendor.

In the middle of our forehead.

Because barely if we are wanderers.

Those who barely go if they go, those who pass by this way.

Although perhaps on the edge of this road On the crossroad of these trails, in any of its many

encounters.

Behind remains the old fire with its wrappings.

Behind the old road with its months and its days.

Now facing this wall, the moss, the darkness.

In our hearts, on our foreheads.

Through these days and its time.

We bring this beautiful light, our heritage.

Splendid heritage that we have received.

On the crossroad of these paths, through these days.

Beautiful light in the middle of the splendor of our heritage.

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So find your place

In the environment Your scale

Your proportion The above the below The before the after Rise and walk Travel Go in and go down Rest With your body

With your work Tell us about

Your passage

Your time This time This space The event of your step Of your existence That matter that reveals to us Our history Francisco Nรกjera New York January 11, 2015 - June 30, 2015.

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Towards the p lace o f the nav el Twenty years ago in Guatemala not a lot of people would have imagined a production as that of artists like Benvenuto Chavajay, Angel and Fernando Poyón, Antonio Pichillá, Manuel Chavajay, Marilyn Boror and Edgar Calel, just to name a few of a list that is getting longer every day. Some of them recently out of their adolescence, the majority came from non-urban places that had been hit hard during the armed conflict, and by the country’s prevailing racism and exclusion. Their initial contact with art was linked rather to important local experiences connected to traditional practices and views, the “primitive”, the “naive”, as it used to be called. Yet, at the end of the 1990’s, young artists like them would begin to be recognized as members of a generation that in some way had to do with the entry of Guatemala in a global contemporaneity. A Guatemala that, after 36 years of obscurantism, suddenly began to connect with the rest of the world.

These artists belonged to a generation whose work entered in dialogue with the most contemporary tendencies in global art, without stopping to question them and above all without disconnecting from their own history, their own local culture, rather establishing new terms to situate themselves within her, establishing frontier areas that permitted them to inhabit - in a conscious way – multiple spaces in a parallel fashion. And, in the case of those young K’iche and Kaqchiquel artists, looking for ways to converse with trends of indigenous painting with which they grew up and until that moment were the benchmark, and whose heartland from 1930 on has been the town of Comalapa and the region of Lake Atitlán.1 One of the strongest voices of this rupture generation was that of Benvenuto Chavajay, who in 1995 moved to Guatemala City to study at the National School of Visual Arts “Rafael Rodríguez Padilla”, (ENAP). There he associated with artists like Manuel Chavajay, Antonio Pichillá, Angel and Fernando Poyón and others who, like him, would mark a before and an after in Guatemalan art. There he would also meet Maestro Roberto Cabrera, whose own interests in problematizing art and thought helped the pursuits of artists like Benvenuto and his desire to “change the structure of the normality of art a bit,” as he himself puts it.2 He took part in the workshop Investigative Study of Science and Art by maestro Cabrera and, from the moment they met until Cabrera’s death, accompanied him on a long itinerary of apprenticeship and dialogue: “My University is called Roberto Cabrera, he helped me intellectually (...),” Benvenuto tells us, “(…) [he said:] “I’m not going to teach you to draw or paint, I’m going to teach you how to think” (…)”3.

1 See Arte naïf, Guatemala: pintura maya guatemalteca contemporánea. Lucrecia Cofiño, coordinadora. UNESCO. 1998.

2 “Lo híbrido que puede ser lo contemporáneo”. Interview by Oswaldo Hernández of Benvenuto Chavajay, Magazine 21, 5 de septiembre de 2010.

3 http://www.prensalibre.com/noticias/Nacionales-Artista-muy-querido-0-1182481751, consulted November 3, 2015.

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One of the first times Benvenuto’s name was heard in more public spheres was from his intervention in the Blue October Festival in 2000, his performance Homage to Guatemala, a twenty-two kilometer walk to Guatemala City. These were times in which the new registers and languages of art began to come to a broader public in Guatemala, nonetheless, for artists like Benvenuto it wasn’t about simply absorbing or reinterpreting them, but to put them into a dialogue with his own thoughts, examinations and learning, a permanent two-way exercise. On the one hand, moving intentionally towards the origins but with the awareness of a Western tradition that for a long time imposed aesthetic canons constructed in geographically distant places of power, but very present in the historic narratives that modeled the way in which we came to terms with our history in a Guatemalan context. One of the results – such is the case of Benvenuto - is the certainty of revealing realities that were concealed for a long time:

When we talk about art, it exists not only in Europe, not only in the West, not only in North America, it also exists in the most remote village in Guatemala.

But as this word “art” didn’t exist there, they label us as ignorant, as unstudied, or as illiterates, this word, “art”, thus, labels us as illiterates. But if we look at it carefully, the truth is that we just have different experiences. And our different experiences is what I am observing or what I am visualizing. Talking with my father, I asked him: “Dad, what is art?” and he answered me “Well, my son, what is that, can you eat that?” And I said, “No dad, art, you know?” And then I realized that the word itself didn’t exist, but when I explained the concept a little bit he said: “Ah, my son, of course!” But that, when we pour water over a stone, it’s that, the sacred, that is the difference in art. The art that we have, the sacred that we have inside, from the inside: it isn’t necessary to write the lake or read the lake like a word, they couldn’t read or write but they did feel it, the lake. And I believe that is the most important thing, that what we want to introduce to people is that you have to feel our things. The colonial world or Western thought covers us and other peoples. We are taking that blanket off and we are discovering. For me, to return is to see the past in front of me, it’s like meeting my navel, meeting my ancestors.”

Here it is worth mentioning another of Benvenuto’s great teachers, Feliciano Pop – professional sculptor – of San Pedro la Laguna, who many would call an artisan and who “ (…) never stopped taking away what was excessive from the stone and never failed to ask permission from the lake to take away those pumice stones with which he worked.”4. With Don Feliciano, Benvenuto has established a permanent conversation that has reinforced a lot of his fundamental ideas that sustain his artistic practice. If maestro Cabrera was the spokesperson from a contemporaneity that was looking to approach the ancestral knowledge of the Mayan culture, Don Feliciano was the spokesperson from a place where those ancestral knowledge was located in an everydayness that did not need analytical exercises of any kind.

4“Lo híbrido que puede ser lo contemporáneo”. Entrevista de Oswaldo Hernández a Benvenuto Chavajay, Magazine 21, 3 de septiembre de 2010.

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photography : Joseph Johnston

video still Muxu’x

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“I know that the West exists, but I exist as well,” would Benvenuto Chavajay say, reflecting upon the new theoretical positions of artists that come from indigenous traditions and that look for a reclaiming of the so-called subordinate cultures or ethnical minorities:

“It’s good that the term decolonial or post-colonial exist,” says Benvenuto, “But these are terms coined by philosophers or semiotics in the United States and South America. I didn’t know if I was working these things that they think of as decolonial. Ten years ago I began a rebellion from the art schools, I didn’t want to do sculptures, for example. Sculpture is the thing one does. What I do is the thing that intervenes. I worked about that with a lot of things, up to paintings. A few years ago I met the investigator Kency Cornejo, she interviewed me, saw my work and told me: “What you are doing comes from a theory: decolonization. Do you know Fanon?” I had just read him a little. But from then on I plunged into the theory. The thing is that I was already doing it in practice, I was getting away a bit from the knowledge and practice of the art schools. Recently I got to know Walter Mignolo, they invited me to the University where he works, and now I understand the point better. But I don’t consider myself a decolonial artist, I am a Tz’utujil artist from San Pedro, a son of the lake. What I do is getting away.

And if they call me a de-colonial artist or practicing decoloniality, that’s okay.

I understand them. I understand why they call me decolonial or that instead of esthetics they talk about aesthesis, but I do what I can do from the earth, so if they want to call me decolonial, I wouldn’t get mad about it, either.”5

And maybe exactly that is why Benvenuto calls his artworks “chunches”, “things”, and, by doing so, puts them in an epistemological universe that confronts us with preconceived ideas about art that, to their cost, keep having a lot of the Renaissance in the popular consciousness which we share:

“When I make an installation (…) I take away this logic of the installation, I want them to be “chunches,” things. That’s why I talked a lot about the “things” because they are objects thrown on the ground, so I want to retrieve these objects and give them a soul, like my dad told me; “Look son, this stone has soul, it has life.” You can’t see it, well the Western world only has these two eyes, but in our world we still have the third eye that maybe isn’t colonized yet. So, this stone that we throw in the middle of the lake and that makes its own waves has soul. So it’s almost the same relation with Duchamp when he placed these objects, (…) you only have to identify, but to identify you have to return to the navel.”6

5 “La dignidad de los chunches. Benvenuto Chavajay.” Published January 23, 2015 by Magazine Gimnasia.

6 Desobediencia visual: Una entrevista con Benvenuto Chavajay y Kency Cornejo, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/ hemi/en/emisferica-111-decolonial-gesture/cornejochavajay. Consulted September 23, 2015.

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El ombligo, muxu’x, la pertenencia, el origen, el pasado pero también el futuro. Pero The navel, “muxu’x”, belonging, the origin, the past, but also the future. But above all the possibility of thought and designation from cultural codes in which knowledge acquires other dimensions than which we are accustomed to. “So I better make sacred things,” Benvenuto tells us, “objects that for the Western world may be art, but for me is like going back and see the past like it is before me (…) I have to get closer to where I’m living, go where they hid my navel, an eternal encounter of a navel”.7 Muxu’x was indeed the title of the exhibition of Benvenuto Chavajay in Ciudad de la Imaginación, curated by Pablo José Ramírez and showing from January 30 to March 27 in 2015. In the words of Ramírez, this exhibition tried to “develop a tour of the work of Benvenuto Chavajay without a chronological guide, but giving rise to premonition and gut feeling, working not only from what we conventionally understand as a “work of art,” but trying to explore the material culture of the artist and his ideas.

MUXU’X is the attempt to re-present a contemporary history as uncomfortable as it is heartening from a specific place: the place of the navel.”8 For Ciudad de la Imaginación, this exhibition relates to one of the most important institutional lines of work, that is, to the intent to bring about spaces of reflection and debate about Guatemala from cultural and artistic experiences that challenge and question us. In this sense, Muxu’x offered us the opportunity to do so from critical perspectives that appeal to history as well as to the artist’s thought like a series of cultural codes in which, beyond the Tz’utujil experience, we can also recognize a lot of ourselves.

The publication that we present here wasn’t just conceived to be a catalogue of the exhibition. Although it documents the works presented in Muxu’x, it also tries to approach in a more integral way the thought and work of an artist that confronts us from different levels of a flexible contemporaneity that doesn’t always defines itself by its sense of the present.

Anabella Acevedo

7 Ibid.

8 From the text of the exhibition room.

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NOT S E ARC H ING , FI N DING In the middle of the decade of the 1950’s the great icon of North American counterculture, Jack Kerouac, drove a car, a nearly destroyed Van, at great speed. In the interior of the car were the basic elements for survival: dirty clothes, records, drugs and some food.

Kerouac drove in a frantic way, as in a state of permanent catharsis, as if looking to get to some place fast, to get there before, to get there first, to get there. When a reporter asked him what he was searching for, his answer was striking: “I don’t search, I find.”

In an interview with Benvenuto Chavajay, published at www.revistagimnasia.com1 for the exhibition Muxu’x2 that I had the opportunity to curate for Ciudad de la Imaginación in January of 2015, Benvenuto was asked about his search, to which the artist responded: “I don’t search. I simply want to heal a wound through my things.

Neither am I searching for originality […]. Each person has his way to look at the world, each person finds his context, his pretext and his text. Originality doesn’t exist.”

Muxu’x was a sort of metaphor of time. A metaphor of another history. A way to break with Cartesian thinking that organizes time in a compartmentalized way. Muxu’x is the navel of Benvenuto Chavajay, a contemporary tz’utujil artist characterized by giving a political meaning to the space from which he speaks: San Pedro la Laguna, Atitlán in Guatemala.

So it appears that Chavajay and Kerouac have something in common. A new image of thought.3 Both aren’t searching to get to a final point, they don’t need a “revelation”, genius doesn’t exist, what there is, is movement and in the words of Benvenuto, “strategies”. From this logic artistic creation as it is, more than a search of a sense of originality, must be based on constant wonderment, on finding from the place that one occupies. Here is the second important element to think about the work of Chavajay: the place of enunciation.

The thesis of “the place of enunciation” has possibly been one of the most significant contributions of decolonial thought, which appears to be this benevolent ghost that accompanies Benvenuto in his work and in his own construction of knowledge, which is something I would like to refer to shortly later on: the idea of the artist-thinker. So what sets Chavajay apart from Kerouac, in addition to the latter’s incessant consuming of psychotropic drugs, is the place from which each one speaks.

1 http://revistagimnasia.com/2015/01/23/dignidadbch/ 2 Muxu’x in the Mayan language Tz’utujil means “navel” 3 The notion of the “new image of thought” is from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, referring to cinema and to the possibility to construct new emancipatory meaning through a sort of agitated and fragmented image.

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To think about the place of Benvenuto Chavajay is to think about his specific character, about his soul. Yes, Nuto (as his friends call him) is that artist that does things with clay, with things that appear to be disposable to the Western culture (plastic balls, mango pips, stones) and redefining them, converting them in chunches (things). Intervening with the objects he bestows on them a kind of aura4.

The point is that these elements with which he works present, more than a resignification of the object, an aesthetic revaluation. They come directly from his culture, from his family, from elements proper to tz’utujil culture. This marks the political sense in his work because like the Zapatista movement stated in that first manifesto of the Lacandona Jungle: “when the silenced speak, rebellion exists.” To speak, therefore, is to rebel. Revalorization.

Benvenuto Chavajay is changing the terms of the conversation. His speaking is an uncomfortable speaking, even though it looks for the dialogue – with the West, its system, its forms, ways, institutions – it is a dialogue that tries to present itself under different terms, trying to twist the rules of the game5. But this is not necessarily a formal question, related exclusively to the object of art or to the aesthetic discourse.

Rather it relates to the same idea of what it means or not to be an artist. When Chavajay mentions that he is more a chunchero than an artist, he refers to this conceptual slip.

A chunchero as such doesn’t create, what he does is give new meaning to sacred objects.

One of the things that have fascinated me the most talking to and working with Benvenuto is this profile of a thinker, which in no way involves intellectualizing or academizing his production, it’s rather that Chavajay produces knowledge from his objects, but he also thinks from the daily happenings of his town, from the wisdom of his parents and grandparents6. He redeems the symbolic and epistemological value of his culture with dignity and force, disrupting any modern concept of history and of time.

So, Nuto is this quintessentially bricoleur.7 A simple and astute person, a chunchero and a thinker. If you ask me, it is this lucid, rebellious and uncomfortable artist that roams the streets of the city, of his village and the saloons, looking for chunches to transform.

The place that Kerouac found was the Van and movement. The place that Benvenuto constantly finds is the one for which he returns with his work, this place that has accompanied him forever.

Pablo José Ramírez Quetzaltenango, october 2015

4 It would be interesting to revise from this the Benjaminian sense of aura. The work of Chavajay, strictly speaking and in some cases in which it is not reproducible, in both the object is unique, there is a unique stone with a unique value, with a soul in terms of the Tz’utujil culture.

5 In this regard, Antonio Pichillá, a visual artist from San Pedro la Laguna close to Benvenuto, mentions that the interesting thing about art is to change its rules, play with it.

6 Jacques Rancière, calls this “communism of intelligence”, thinking of the necessity to subvert any vertical notion of the master (in this case, the master from Western culture, the art schools, the academia) 7 Citing Levi Strauss on his idea of the bricoleur, “The bricoleur is capable of performing a wide variety of diverse tasks but, by contrast with the engineer, does not subject any of these tasks to the availability of materials or tools [...] The name of the game is always to make do with “the means to one’s disposal” [...]

The elements are gathered and preserved via the principle that “this could come in handy someday”.”

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ART AN D M ATHEM AT ICS: A pos s ib le fus ion in the 2 1st c entury For many years it was thought that the only science that could sustain the bases of rationality was mathematical thinking, based on axioms and theorems that would permit to achieve an “objectivity” in the comprehension of natural phenomena. That approach was very important for the development of science until the 21st century.

However, during those centuries the contribution of the arts: painting, sculpture, music, etc., as generators of knowledge and social inquiry, was made invisible because society assigned to it the status of “artistic expression”, with which the middle class could relax and enjoy themselves without any relation to the development of science and knowledge.

Science is alive, it nourishes itself with different contributions of the average citizen, of the artist, the writer, the farmer, the weaver, the mathematician, the professor, etc. Even if we don’t realize it, all of us have contributed to the development of art, science and culture. The diverse possibilities of constructing knowledge nowadays are a reality. The work of Benvenuto Chavajay and me that humbly has encouraged the Mayan epistemology these last years can consider ourselves as manifestations of the cultural practices of the Tz’utujil community; even though his theorization has come from different schools of thinking, we are united in feeling, sensibility, appreciation and respect for the tangible and intangible. In the end, the common base isn’t just situated in some aspects of life, but has happened in an integral and holistic way; because we have been formed and comforted by the same energies of the majestic mountains and volcanoes that embellish Lake Atitlán.

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Photography : Fernando FeliĂş. Selection of archive footage. see page 34

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If our comprehension of the world from a mathematical base is already limited, to exclude the arts as living tools for the understanding of this world makes our limited vision only more evident. What does it mean then, to have a holistic vision of our context and our world that we inhabit? It implies inclusion, an epistemological relativism and a coexistence in diversity.

Mathematics has won the nomination of a hegemonic science, supported by formalism as school of thought, where the final goal of man is the search for truth, a truth based on Euclidian abstractions. But this idea has changed, in the 21st century it’s not important to demonstrate the truth, but to characterize the phenomena behind beliefs, preconceptions, traditions, social practices, etc. where the participation of men and women is necessary for the resignification of the forming of a multicultural society.

Even though artists have suffered the exclusion from the “men of science”, those that construct the “wise knowledge” in the words of Chevallard, they as well have excluded those that have other ways of looking at the world, that show not only a skill in their art, but an idea, an invention, a reunion, a resignification of objects, a return to the roots, or simply a different form of expression that sees itself transformed in an epistemology born out of and felt by a diverse society.

When the sciences and art combine with feelings, we have cracked the structure of a hegemonistic, axiomatic and colonizing idea, which for a long time had made us believe that there is only one way to do science or make art. And even worse is, we have adopted a passive and submissive attitude that sees itself replicated in diverse cultural settings, forgetting the sociocultural context in which art and science develops.

Generally, it becomes very difficult to talk of a decolonization, as Walter Mignolo has referred to, if we are products of a colonization; or to lay aside “Western” mathematics, if our first lessons in numerical systems in school have been based on the number ten.

We are invaded by an “alien” logic that predominates in the world.

Talking about the logic of our grandparents is difficult and inoperable for our universities, because the formal structure doesn’t permit it or simply because they choose to shield themselves with the need of international standards, that claim to form competent citizens for the industry. Consequently, to talk about Mayan mathematics seems to be more difficult than talking about algebra or integral calculus.

What does it mean to be a creator and thinker in art and science in our time? It means to have a proper identity or self-definition, a firm belief and a social commitment.

Because not only philosophy or philosophy of science make man more sensible to social and scientific problems, but art is the animated artifact that raises awareness through sensations, sounds, colors, textures, flavors and smells.

In my native town, place of mountains, volcanoes and majestic contrasts of light that embellish the humble houses of its inhabitants, I have seen emerge and prosper a great number of artists, who without thinking too much about their daily tasks, are the living example of the modern contrast, where the artist doesn’t feel like an artist, but as a simple neighbor who communicates his feelings with their sociocultural surroundings.

That is the case of Benvenuto Chavajay, an artist that gets inspiration in the Tz’utujil everyday life, where color isn’t perceived just by the sense of sight, but also by the

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sense of smell, and where art can’t be defined because the notion of art doesn’t exist in the mother tongue.

In this little town the “beauty” that forms itself with the weaving and patchwork of the fabrics of the women is not a hobby, but an expression of and communication with Mother Nature, whose geometrical figures aren’t abstract human inventions, but cosmologic and zoomorphic. Consequently, to talk about beauty in this context only recovers meaning if it is experiential and holistic, if it takes into consideration cultural, spiritual, biological, astronomical aspects of the community.

Beauty is an element of fusion between art and mathematics, between the sciences and spiritual and emotional expression. As Chadrasekhar said, it’s not just the mechanic beauty of its symbols, and much less the elegance that is seen in its manifestations and calculations, but, in essence it’s the simplicity of our understanding about beauty. Not a simplicity of a mechanical type that can be found counting the number of equations or symbols in the case of mathematics; or counting the geometrical patterns that are displayed in a work of art. It is the simplicity of ideas with which people act daily, like the daily tasks of the fishermen, basket-weavers, farmers, weavers of my little town called San Pedro La Laguna, home of great musicians, painters and conceptual artists like Benvenuto Chavajay.

These little differences are what makes us remember that we live in a diverse world, with diverse social, political and mental structures. To keep on proclaiming an overall approach for the development of the sciences or an overall method for the development of art isn’t possible. Why should we think that the “rhombus” that is seen in the dress of Mayan women represents the concept of a rhombus by Euclid?

Although in this practical situation it is possible that all the investigators in the area of mathematics or educational mathematics say that effectively it is a rhombus, because it has four sides that all have the same length and its opposing internal angles are also equal, this description doesn’t correspond with the beauty or the complexity of the explanation that a Tz’utujil woman weaver could give. Because this “thing” that looks like a rhombus stands for the fabric of Mayan life, embodied in the web of a spider, the mesh to store the corncobs or the net for fishing.

Finally, the fusion of mathematics with the arts is nothing new for the Mayan community: it can be seen in the great constructions of its temples, the architectural designs were accompanied with great artistic creations. And we just resignify that way of living, acting, communicating with the elements of the environment. In such a way the decolonization in art like the works of Benvenuto or the epistemological relativism of mathematics is an actual requirement to understand the cultural diversity in Guatemala.

Domingo Yojcom Rocché Centre of Scientific and Cultural Research San Pedro La Laguna, 20 October 2015.

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I t all b egan by cros s ing the lake In November 2014 we inaugurated in the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) of Costa Rica the exhibition “Chunches [Mololon tak nakun]” of Benvenuto Chavajay. This was a process that began several months before, with intermittent conversations and e-mails, but couldn’t be realized until accepting Nuto’s invitation to visit his town.

Some years ago, the MADC set itself the goal to make exhibitions that serve as individual reviews of artists of different generations, not only Costa Ricans, but also working year by year with different artists of Central America. It is always interesting to observe the reaction of the museum’s public to the submissions of foreign artists, but in this case I knew it was going to be different in some way. It wasn’t just an exhibition of a Guatemalan artist, but of an artist who presents himself as Tz’utujil.

Every exhibition presents a different challenge to the curatorial endeavor, not only from the dialogue that is established with the artist, but as well in the transfer of the content to the public from a state museum. Each exhibit is a personal challenge on the level of awareness and interpretation of new ways of seeing, but in this case it was even more so, thinking about from the practice of contemporary curatorship of a country like Costa Rica, that has made invisible and isolated its indigenous heritage.

So the process really started in Guatemala with the intent to study and understand a Pre-Hispanic heritage, to later start specifically from “this place” and the reality of the town of San Pedro La Laguna. A visit to the town, the streets and the people, to understand how art and specifically painting function and are experienced. Included as well were conversations with Don Feliciano Pop, Antonio Pichillá and Domingo Yojcom together with his wife, his son and friends. Also the many stories about Roberto Cabrera, the tireless company of Pablo José Ramírez and the continued support of El Cabro.

Now with Nuto in Costa Rica, after more stories, books and talks, walking and walking, cups of coffee and dinners, learning to make clay tortillas, the exhibit turned out to be an exercise in collective construction beginning with the concerns of the artist and his place of enunciation. An opportunity to revise and dig deeper in his work and to open a forum for discussion.

So “Chunches” in the MADC started from elucidating the lines of investigation in the work of Benvenuto and his ideas, where he points out that: “in the last years I have been working with and thinking about objects-chunches that are in the collective memory, senseless objects thrown in a certain place, in the corner of a house, on a gray pavement, on the road, on the children’s playing ground, or what is eaten or worn daily. The job of the artist is to recognize these chunches and give them another value toward a sacred-aesthetic transfiguration.”

These chunches, found and gathered, resignify themselves in his work from photography, intervened objects and installation, to make possible the development of a discourse that gets broader and broader, but that draws from reaffirming the defining feature of an indigenous Mayan cultural reality.

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Concepts as modernity/coloniality are encompassed from a decolonial perspective that seeks a confrontation and detachment with the “colonial pattern of power” according to Aníbal Quijano, or as the artist himself says: “heal the colonial wound” from the art of the Deep America.

From the detachment of the rhetoric of modernity, in which models of thinking are legitimized that present themselves as counterparts of the social organization and its historic process, is where the rupture has been sought of this “matrix of power”, as Walter Mignolo calls it. The reclaiming of a past covered by different implantations has become apparent from its complexity and combination of traditions, now from a contemporary language, as a resource to give voice to what has been silenced.

A lot of his ideas seek to go “lift the layers” that have covered and obstructed the indigenous past, like a way to make visible bit by bit the resistance that Pre-Hispanic cultures have put up over the centuries. According to the artist, in Mayan thinking the past is situated before and not behind us, from there arises the tattooing of his last name, “Ch’ab’aq Jay” in the Mayan language, on his chest.

Tattooing “Ch’ab’aq” (mud) and “Jaay” (house), is a form of recognizing and returning, as a way of vindicating the Tz’utujil language and reaffirming that “his past is in front of him”.

But, how to assemble a script without exoticizing a production that is so specific? The curatorial process involved then trying to understand a bit better this past and these layers that Nuto talks about, from a more direct contact with him and with the surroundings where his projects are being developed. The exhibition is inserted in a gallery space that seeks to be a platform for the plurality of visions from contemporary artistic production in the region, and that is way the exhibit was not only relevant, but necessary as well.

The project moreover proposed a dialogue with a lot of people in Costa Rica, with students of the School of Visual Arts of the University of Costa Rica, with the Chair of ceramics, with students from the School of Art and Visual Communication of the National University, with the museum’s staff, this at the level of discussion and the production of the work as well…That was it, open up spaces to converse and converse with a lot of people.

After the inauguration, the exhibition continued to have a lot of dialogue and more questions for the artist from the public that visited the room. The visits of Nuto to Costa Rica as well are more and more frequent. Rather, I’m aware that although the exhibitions finish, close and are dismantled, the connections that are created are the things that really last.

Right now we don’t get to set up another exhibit, but this process of meetings and conversations with Nuto goes on. This channel that was opened is a constant conversation, a personal interest in research and thought, a going and coming, and an everlasting desire to go back taking a boat and crossing the lake.

María José Chavarría Curator MADC, Costa Rica 19

T he hi story o f the wound

“Why would I make art when the art is already made?” Benvenuto Chavajay sips from his glass of beer and keeps looking out the window that faces the 6th avenue; this principal avenue of the Historic Centre, this window that has the word Bambú written on it with a typography that ingenuously imitates Mandarin. I turn and look at the boy that performs as a living statue so that the passers-by give him coins. It’s a Friday and people are walking like crazy. Benvenuto continues: “I am an ex-sculptor, I just pick up what has been thrown away and I put it into view for people.”

The waitress returns and sets down another liter of beer. We talk about trivial things that happen in the office where we work. At times Chavajay’s eyes focus on objects and at times they focus on people. I love to observe him as he is watching. I think about the privilege to be his crony, his mate, his accomplice, his comrade, his buddy…We were students of the same master, Roberto Cabrera, and maybe that coincidence is what gives us a focal point to talk about research, about the ritual, about the sacred and about what is hidden in the margins of the popular. We both gave classes at the same school and we both smashed into the same wall of red tape and mediocrity that envelops art education in Guatemala.

With the passing of the hours and with the flowing of the beer we are getting more loquacious. We talk about politics, about sadness, about relatives, about curators, about artists, about boredom, about miracles and about the strange light that degree by degree settles on the Sixth Avenue at six in the afternoon. Gramsci, Fanon, Spivak, Jameson, Mignolo, Doroteo Guamuch, Feliciano Pop, Cabrera, Pasolini, Pound, San Pedro la Laguna…The waitress of the restaurant passes a wet cloth over the table and serves us soup; the owner, a Korean woman who is glued to the cash register looks at us with suspicion. I am celebrating with my friend his coming home after one of his regular trips. He tells me about his partners. Chavajay tells me a word in Tz’utujil and then explains what it means, trying to find the most exact term but he needs several sentences to translate the sound of a syllable for me. If a language is the universe of a culture, I’m aware that between us are several constellations of difference. How can we be so close and yet so different? Easy: Guatemala is a small country with too much ravines. So we pass the awkward threshold of our origin, luckily that ladino/indigenous boundary is something that was erased a long time ago between us and words like “epistemicide” and “decolonization” come up.

The first is the diagnosis of what has happened and the second is possibly the exit tunnel so that new ways of talking can emerge. To be or not to be Mayan? That is the question. The beer is doing its thing, a friend enters the restaurant and finds us locked in a strange conversation. He is a poet and sociologist that is about to go to Germany. His discourse sticks to doubting and he questions a lot of our references. The borders of the self-educated are portable, one carries them along always and puts them where they are useful. I am much more rhetoric and passionate in my answers. Benvenuto closes himself off and remains silent for long periods of time. By then I realize that silence is an exemplary way to respond when a scheme is imposed upon us. There is a lot of spirituality in this silence, a lot of self-restraint.

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A decade ago I asked Benvenuto Chavajay about the sacred. I was preparing an article for the magazine Taxi and I wanted to be as didactic as possible. Chavajay began by explaining that the term “art” doesn’t exist in Tz’utujil and that when someone wants to refer to the action of painting a picture, he uses a word associated with manual labor. When he became aware of this paradox, he opted to look for something completely opposite to the artistic profession: the search for the sacred.

“What is the sacred then?” I ask him. A minute of silence. “It’s when you do or choose something that traps the spirit of people,” he responds. Without a doubt we live in a society where spirituality follows two tracks: the one of ritual as an affirmation of survival and the one of superstition that keeps us subject to the conformism of chance. To think about that three hundred years ago the most common forced labor was masonry, is to realize that, both the colonial churches and their dazzling interiors, were constructed by the oppressed and condemned. Not to mention the imagery that has many indigenous artisans behind the names of the most well-known peninsular artists during colonial times.

After a half hour of silence, Benvenuto speaks: “You don’t understand a crap of what we are talking about,” and our friend shuts up. Years ago I realized that the clearer an idea we have is, we need less detours to defend it. What’s complicated about a work is when it lacks a bibliography, when it doesn’t have an official history and when there are no visible traces that legitimize it. That is how we have accustomed ourselves so much to common places. That’s why we sugar the pill again and again with predictable and uniform ideas that come in waves to fill the empty spaces of the galleries or the Biennials. The problem is that the Central American art is taking the easy way out of accepting as legitimate all that reflects our open wounds without objecting to our scars and scabs. Underneath the pustule lies the infection. The process of the tissue death is the history of the wound. That’s when I hear him talking of removing and healing. I hold the idea in my mind, maybe the act of creating brings with it the antibiotics and the cauterizer. Maybe the act of creating is recognizing negated beauty. Maybe the act of creating is this anthology of lost and forgotten things. Maybe the act of creating is to recover the meaning of the words and the deeds.

Inside a blue backpack Chavajay carries a beautiful Canon camera that accompanies him everywhere. He puts aside the empty glasses – already six of ‘em – and shows us the images captured during the week: exploded balloons, broken combs, strange toys, cracks in the asphalt, smears of painting… Then I realize that his intention is to go back to the forgotten and save everything he can. To take, for example, the identity card of Doroteo Guamuch Flores, the Olympic marathon runner that was renamed Mateo Flores because a gringo broadcaster couldn’t pronounce his name, and tattoo it on his back, is like searching these historic gestures of contempt to show them, heal them and dignify them in the present. It is not the Recordación Florida (Florida Remembrance, a chronicle of the landscape and quarry of Guatemalan racism written by Fuentes and Guzmán) that he looks for, but the Reconciliation Florida. The past serves to learn from it, not to repeat it. “The past is what we have in front of us,” he tells me as a personal aphorism.

With the hours comes the time to pay the Korean woman and leave the Chinese restaurant of cheap beer. The Sixth Avenue of zone 1 is deserted. The shops have closed and the homeless take over the streets. Everything is filled with darkness. In every corner is a police patrol; a transvestite or a street girl prostituting herself; a group of glue-sniffers and more than one preacher on crack that keeps on screaming in his megaphone. The apocalypse can be a small place. “We are part of all this,” I tell my friends. “Really nothing seems too strange for us, because Guatemala is a state of mind, it’s not a country.” They laugh. We come to the building where Benve lives…we hug each other goodbye. Out here the night is always cold. We go light-headed and happy. It’s incredible, all that you can learn in a Chinese restaurant. Chavajay changes his mind and tells me we better keep on going, waiting for dawn.

Javier Payeras Guatemala 22 de october 2014 21

my navel stays here buried in the deepest earth it developed into a stick at the point of sprouting into the voice of my father in silences and tattooed words in the deepest of my essence my navel stays here like a stone

I’m the land that nobody sowed the grains of corn that the birds ate The clay pot that wears away with time the embers and the ashes the firewood stacked in the courtyard the ears of corn the shoes of my grandfather the güipil of my grandmother the wall of concrete block I’m like the remembrance that goes with the wind

When I was a boy my mother gave me atol to drink When I was a boy my mother took me to the nixtamal mill When I was a boy my mother imagined that I was a kernel of corn When I was a boy I lived in a field, a big field And I was a cornfield

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Grandfather, I carry him like things are carried which are impossible to shed I carry him in my hands between my fingers that don’t know the earth I carry him in my shoes in every step I take I carry his life and also his death I carry his irretrievable necessity to drown his sorrow in drink I carry him in the words of every poem I write I carry him like I have carried solitude I carry him, grandfather like the silence like an everlasting answer like a way of beginning. .

We are the seeds they have let drop in the earth pieces of universe earth that meets earth We are kernel of corn that will bear its fruit that will die and will be born again.

Marvin GarcĂ­a Quetzaltenango, 2015

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video still Muxu’x

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De la serie 4’ 33’’

4’ 33’’ is a musical work by the North American composer John Cage in 1952. The piece can be interpreted by any instrument or ensemble. In the score, with the word “tacet”, the interpreter is told to keep silent for four minutes and thirty three seconds.

Some theorists of the musical avant-garde consider that the sonorous material of the work is composed by the noises that the spectator hears during this time. The piece 4’ 33’’ has become the most famous and controversial work of John Cage.

With this same name, Benvenuto Chavajay looks to generate a dialogue with John Cage’s piece, but in this case alluding to the object as a place of silence. The clay microphones positioned on pedestals and against the wall confront the paradox of the amplification of silence – or of the silenced. Silence in the Tz’utujil culture is understood to be a form of communication and socialization.

Pablo José Ramírez

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Anesthesia

They put quotation marks on us “ ” They detained us between parentheses ( They denied our history They darkened our dignity They silenced our speech They anesthetized our history.

)

They didn’t come to discover America, but to cover it. Colonialism/coloniality/ modernity and the West sickened our history, they kept us waiting, in an enormous and endless waiting room. Here and now, over there, we are throwing away the quotation marks, opening the parentheses, shaking off the dust that develops from such a covering, without effect facing the anesthesia…

“We’ll plant those reeds in the center of our house. When the corn dries up, it will be a sign of our death. But when they sprout: They are alive! you will say. Dear grandmother, dear mother, don’t cry. We leave a sign of our existence with you, said the twins.” Popol Wuj Vaccination is a way to heal the colonial wound and the dark side of the West. Vaccinate history by the tears and the sweat that create a mud of memory.

Benvenuto Chavajay

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Selection of archive footage

I asked Benvenuto Chavajay to give me access to his photography archive to look for fragments of that important thing in the work of an artist: his place of enunciation. I was interested to find images would help to understand him – partially –from a certain intimacy. That’s why it was necessary to get closer to his material culture, history, dystopic landscapes and people that influenced his work. This selection features photographs of the archive of the Taa Pit Cortez Foundation, Rene de Carufel and of the artist himself.

Pablo José Ramírez

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Return

I obtained Bibles in Spanish and in a Mayan language, Tz’utujil, Kaqchikel, K’iche’, etc. I painted the text that appeared in Spanish as a form of erasing. Erasing is a way of covering and healing. It’s about a way to heal a colonial wound from the original peoples of this deep and suffering America.

America wasn’t discovered, it was covered. It is time to take away this blanket.

Benvenuto Chavajay

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Garden

Stones and straps of flip-flops of the brand Suave Chapina.

My childhood happened at a few meters from the Atitlรกn lake, I shared with the stones, I played with the stones, I talked to them. In a way they were my kindergarten and the lake was my swimming pool. As an artist I want to share my garden in any part of the world.

Benvenuto Chavajay

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Ch’ab’aq Jaay

I did a performance that consisted of tattooing my real last name: Ch’ab’aq Jaay, which could not be pronounced by the invaders.

To tattoo Ch’ab’aq (mud) Jaay (house) is a form of recognizing, returning and sprouting the past. In indigenous thought the past is before us, not behind. With this piece I reconfirm and reaffirm that the past is before us Benvenuto Chavajay

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Pato Poc

“Tender muses persecuted by the invaders, exhausted and scared they reached the precipice of the cliff looking it straight in the eyes, the beating of their hearts marked the moment of throwing themselves into the abyss, the wind rejoiced in the departure of the maidens, falling they opened their wings and changed into white doves…

Remembering the achievement, their descendants placed elusive, skittish little clay doves on their humble houses, that not tomorrow, not ever, will you be unknown.”

Extract of the legend “Flight of the virgins” of the Tz’utujil poet Luis Batz.

From the event of the maidens on, on top of the houses of the Tz’utujiles were placed clay doves in memory of the resistance of the daughters of the lake and of the Tz’utujiles. It reminds us that from the time of the so-called colonial plundering, the indigenous woman always has been the first to resist.

To engrave the outline of this image frozen in time (the little doves on the humble houses) is to bring to memory the legacy of my ancestors. At the same time it is also a Poc duck, a metaphor of the sad bird that disappeared from the lake Benvenuto Chavajay

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Doroteo Guamuche

Doroteo Guamuche Flores (1922-2011) won the Boston marathon in 1952. At that time a gringo photographer couldn’t pronounce his name and simplified it to “Mateo Flores” in the press release. His name stayed that way erroneously until his death.

It was also the name they used to rename the national stadium of Guatemala after naming it “Of the Revolution” in the era of the Guatemalan Revolution (1944-1954).

The work consists in tattooing the identity card of Doroteo Guamuch Flores, in which his real name appears, on my back. With this project it is intended as well to propose to the authorities to change the name of the “Mateo Flores” stadium to “Doroteo Guamuche”, as a gesture to heal a wound of the people that have been silenced and excluded.

Benvenuto Chavajay

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Zut

The fabrics of the tortillas are a memorial of all the indigenous women of Guatemala that work in the capital city. This fabric is only used within the perimeter of the city and it replaces the zut. Zut is with which they envelop the tortillas in the indigenous towns in the interior of the country.

The fabrics are also a homage to all the Guatemalan women that make tortillas.

Benvenuto Chavajay

Yooq’

Hot corn tortillas with salt, pressed in the palm of the hand by the mother to calm or silence a whining child when the mother is in the kitchen. Yooq’ is related to the pacifier or baby bottle. It is the first image of a sculptural object that I remember my mother made. It is recorded and engraved in my memory and in the memory of Tz’utujil children.

In me, here and now Yooq’ detains the necessity to look towards the West, to keep away from the thoughts and structures imposed by a modern-Western world. Keeping away forces me to get closer, get closer to the most important thing, to the earth, to the sacred practices and to the thoughts of the ancestors, to talking with the earth, to the eternal search for the navel, to keep in mind that the past is in front of us…

In this series of tortillas of burnt clay I used earth as powder, I knead it to remember my mother’s resilience to tears and chaos.

When a teardrop falls on the earth, it creates a mud of memory…

Benvenuto Chavajay

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Material of the National Newspaper Archive

The material included in this section was collected from the National Newspaper Archive of Guatemala. The reports are related to the response that officials of the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán gave to the victory of Doroteo Guamuche in the Boston marathon of 1952, as well as the propagandistic hijacking of some companies like United Fruit Company of the same fact. This reflects the dispute between the revolutionary officials and the companies that were part of the anticommunist intervention in Guatemala.

The figure of Doroteo Guamuche turns out to be interesting because it reflects the racist profile of a society that in the middle of the 20th century tries to construct a nationalist tale that moves from a capitalistic economic model of progressive cut to tales of a ladino bloodline.

The material was accompanied by the audio of an interview of Mr. Mario Domínguez, adviser of the Autonomous Sport Confederation of Guatemala (CDAG). In the interview is told what happened with the name change of the Mateo Flores stadium.

This was inaugurated for the Central American Olympics of 1950 as “Stadium of the Revolution”. With the overthrow of the government of Arbenz by the counterrevolution, under governmental decree, the stadium changed its name and began to be called Mario Flores Stadium in 1955. There is no record of any public event for the name change.

Pablo José Ramírez

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In Guatemala there are such small towns that fit in the sights of a rifle

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Sin tĂ­tulo

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