In My Brother’s House

Edgar Calel & Paulo Nazareth

Proyectos Ultravioleta
Presenta:
In My Brother’s House
++ Public Program of Artistic Actions A Gusto
Paulo Nazareth and Edgar Calel
Guatemala City / San Juan Comalapa
December 16, 2023
Curatorship and text by: Luciana de Oliveira

Art and shamanism can transcend the limits of representation through performance.

A man walks around a large tree, its thick trunk decorated with flags. He walks backward. Goats, people, cars, motorcycles, and a statue facing backward compose the changing stage of this repetitive action. The noise of the city can be heard. A man appears in a forest of tall and imposing trees, walking. He drags a bush tied in his long black braid, carrying a bouquet of flowers in his hands and roots on his face as a mask. The sunlight magnetizes the forest and the man. The first man takes many turns, walking backward around the large tree. The second man passes quickly. He exits the forest and ventures into it, climbing a mountain. The tree seems like an extension of his body. Two walking men, two trees. How does time twist to create existential territories and crossroads that nourish and expand this act of images in motion? Sometimes one must follow the bananas. Think about geopolitics through the eye of the banana. The banana crosses borders that certain bodies do not cross, as was the case with Paulo Nazareth’s attempt to cross the U.S. border with Pedro Calel driving a green van full of bananas. Pedro’s visa was not approved. The bananas reached the border open to the “free market,” but they could not be transported by the hands that planted them. Unwanted hands of unwanted bodies. Since before the era of the United Fruit Company, Guatemalan bananas have been welcomed in many parts of the world. Guatemala, the only Latin American country that has managed to carry out a moderate but inspiring agrarian reform, suffered a harsh political blow that reinstalled dictatorship and state violence as a way to ensure the privileges of landowners through the ongoing colonialism that expropriates indigenous territories and lives. But still, one can follow the mate tea with its small eye. It was because of mate tea that eight indigenous reserves were created in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, confining the Kaiowá and Guaraní Nhandeva peoples to artificial territories so that natural herbal resources could be freely exploited by the Matte Larangeira Company, another “multinational” – which is more of a North American “mononational” – obviously using semi-enslaved indigenous labor as the basis for accumulation. Edgar Calel became acquainted with this reality in 2014 when he visited a retaken and self-demarcated territory of the Kaiowá people. In Brazil, that gigantic country surrendered (or condemned) to agribusiness and mining, there has never been agrarian reform. When there was a glimpse of carrying it out, it was followed, as in Guatemala, by a coup d’état and a corporate-civic dictatorship that lasted 21 years. Although the State, in the 1988 constitutional charter, recognized the original right to land of indigenous peoples, as well as the occupation of unproductive lands by landless rural workers, there is no legal certainty nor significant efforts to regularize the demarcation of ancestral traditional territories or settlements. That’s why Edgar Calel invited people from that community – men, women, elders, children, a little monkey – to imprint their footprints on paper or on the white abyss (Qetalh ri ca winaqi pa sãnq siwan/The trace of our people in the white abyss, 2014). Feet that, for millennia, walk and demarcate the territory that, as the Kaiowá testify, “is ours because the land is the color of our skin.” If the land is a mother and a tree can be a home, the exhibition “In My Brother’s House” (Projects Ultraviolet/Guatemala City) and the Public Program of Artistic Actions A Gusto (Casa Kit Kit/San Juan Comalapa-Chi Xot) is a meeting to reactivate the time machine seen in works such as L’Arbre D’Oublier / The Tree of Forgetting (Paulo Nazareth/2013) and At nu jukukempe / I bring you dragging with me (Edgar Calel/2016). It is a space of liberation, where all bodies with all their stories and memories fit. Whether it is the desire to reverse or invert time, to present traumatic pasts and re-project healing in spiral time, or the desire to make room in time for bodies that, expanded by their stories and memories, branch out across an entire continent, the millennia-old history of the great “Ladino Amefrica” It is an encounter of art, but it is also family love. A family can be the size of a continent; it can interconnect nations, species, interconnect the world here and beyond. We are open to this and would like to continue sharing, making the ceremonial wheel larger. Entering slowly and with affection into my brother’s house. Not without asking permission. Permission!