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Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

The Guardian of the Forest

Presented by KADIST & Proyectos Ultravioleta
Curated by Magali Arreola
Proyectos Ultravioleta
Guatemala City
8 sep, 2018 - 09 feb, 2019

Narrative and performance interweave in Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice (Guatemala, 1978) through the use of images and sculptural objects linking history and autobiography.

El guardián del bosque results from a collaboration between KADIST and Proyectos Ultravioleta, and presents the first chapter of El mensajero del bosque sumergido (The Messenger of the Sunken Forest) a longterm project commissioned by KADIST for The Missing Circle that will be developed in different locations.

El mensajero del bosque sumergido arises from the research carried out by Ramírez-Figueroa in December 2017 in Rio Negro, in the regions of Alta and Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. The artist explores the historical memory and political reality of the ruins of Kawinal, an archeological site of postclassic Mayan culture that was flooded in order to construct the hydroelectric dam of Chixoy—which began in 1975 to be inaugurated in 1983—in a supposed effort to bring electricity to the country. However, the reality was that the communities living in the area faced the swamping of their lands and properties, and endured the loss of their sacred sites; those who refused to relocate became the victims—many of which were women and children—of what came to be known as the 1982 massacre of Río Negro at the hands of the military, the spectral traces of which still pervade behind the natural and cultural landscape of the region.

Ramírez-Figueroa revisits this event in Guatemalan history to elaborate a narrative that, as many of his projects, is inhabited by hybrid creatures combining human figures, animal or vegetable forms, and bearing sculptural and performative components. Guardián 1, Guardián 2 and Guardián 3 are a series of one-handed tree trunks conceived to be held by a cohort of kids in order to emulate an arid forest of solitary limbs. The work will be presented in dialogue with Ramírez-Figueroa’s 2016 El corazón de espantapájaros (Heart of Scarecrow). Costumes, masks and props were conceived by the artist for a script he commissioned to writer Wingston González based on the original homonymous theater play penned by Hugo Carrillo in 1962. In 1975, a group of students of experimental theater famously re-staged Carrillo’s work, a highly critical play that referred to the government officials of the time that was not only censored by a military backed administration, but resulted in the burning down of the theater, a series of threats to the actors integrity and in one death. For this new version imagined by Ramírez-Figueroa, the archetypes of the president, the oligarch, the cardinal, the soldier and a scarecrow (the name given to the abandoned dead bodies in Carrillo’s work) embody an uncanny episode of history that emerges from the eye-witnesses accounts.

In both works fiction, memory and history collide to enact a sort of danse macabre between violence and resistance that spreads beyond the borders of Guatemala, echoing in different times and spaces the political reality of Latin America and other regions.

Other exhibitions by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa at Proyectos Ultravioleta: