22nd Bienal De Arte Paiz Guatemala: Lost. In Between. Together. Curated by Alexia Tala, chief curator, and Gabriel Rodríguez.
Planet Indigo Dust is an alfombra celebrating the Maya heritage and culture. The Maya have lived in Central America for many centuries. They are one of the many Precolumbian native peoples of Mesoamerica. In the past and today they occupy Guatemala, adjacent portions of Chiapas and Tabasco, the whole of the Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, and the western edges of Honduras and Salvador.
Every Semana Santa, Guatemalans decorate their streets with colorful & intricate sawdust carpets. Before Easter, the streets are decorated with elaborate, colorful alfombras de aserrín – made of sawdust, flowers, palm leaves, and other organic matter that feature religious and cultural figures. For these chapter of the Electric Dub Station series we could not travel to Guatemala, because the pandemic restrictions, but gratefully we collaborated with one of the finest alfombristas in Guatemala City to create Planet Indigo Dust, an electric blue alfombra based on our classic DNA sequence pattern, combined with Mayan patterns and other mesoamerican abstract symbology.
The participation of our ongoing decolonization project Electric Dub Station in the Paiz Art Biennial marks a collaboration with one of the most important curators in South America: Alexia Tala. Creating Planet Indigo Dust in Guatemala offers a metaphorical consolidation of a Pan-Maya movement in Guatemala, Abya Yala Movement in The Americas.
The 22nd Bienal De Arte Paiz Guatemala invites visitors to reflect on the situation of perpetual crisis that affects the Global South. With Guatemala as a point of departure to investigate the cultural and geographical diversity of Latin America and beyond in the Global South, the approximation of the 22 Bienal de Arte Paiz towards issues around contemporary and ancestral history, interculturality, forms of knowledge and violence aims to establish points of encounter between art and the current context.
Lost. In Between. Together seeks to focus on the ability of the Global South to tell its own story, with an observant look at both its roots and its present, reuniting artistic expressions marked by activism, awareness of human rights and the power of certain geographies, or artistic expressions linked to traditions and ancestral knowledge where art often encroaches in the territory of the sacred.
Music: Sergio Valle, Piano - Anngie Aragón, Saxo
Dancers: Larissa del Pozo, Benjamín Arévalo Arroyave y Melek González.
Photos from: Andres Asturias & Marvin Asijtuj.