“Todo Mal” is an exploration of generational trauma. The current immigration crisis is a direct result of American interests in Latin America and in Guatemala, the US helped aid a Mayan genocide. Much of the indigenous land was owned by […]
“Todo Mal” is an exploration of generational trauma. The current immigration crisis is a direct result of American interests in Latin America and in Guatemala, the US helped aid a Mayan genocide.
Much of the indigenous land was owned by United Fruit Company and the President of Guatemala started buying the land back at the cost that UF valued it at and gifting it back to the Mayan people to farm. United Fruit went to the USA which started a propaganda campaign to label this equality movement as communism and helped the Guatemalan Army with training and weapons to instigate a coup d’tat and instill a fascist ruler. After a rebellion arose, the Army started a scorched earth campaign to all of the Mayan villages, leaving mass graves behind them.
The work attempts to mix visual allegory of the sacred jungle creatures, American interventionists as worms, and tries to illustrate the antifascist guerilla army of the poor and victims of terror in a flattened style like that of Mayan woven blankets. Use of minimal color is a comment on the tradition of vibrancy that defines the lives and art of Mayans drained from them and mirroring ICE detention camps as being a monochromatic endpoint.
There’s a circle of horror and frustration being crushed by an empire and when you flee from violence, you’re detained and punished again and again and again.
Being of Mayan descent- this show is a self portrait, processing self in a historical context to educate through art, and the speak truth of the wider web of America’s nonstop racism.
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