| THE SOLDIER IN THE MIRROR and FUNDACION YAXS It has been a privilege to collaborate on an art investigation and participate in a residency with Fundacion YAXS, in Guatemala City, Guatemala. The investigation, titled The Soldier in the Mirror, uses the cultural and artistic archives of the foundation as springboards to creating profoundly experimental work. The Soldier in the Mirror consists of used U.S. government munition tins and mirrors, and employs real and semblances of violence to consider the inability for individual disengagement within a globalized economy from the greater socio-political theatre. ARCHIVES The archives of Fundacion YAXS are cloud based documentary memories of the cultural and artistic legacies of Guatemala and its people, existing outside of intense immediate and systemic pressure to dilute, erase, or alter such legacies. See https://www.yaxs.org |
ROLE OF CONTEMPORARY ART Working on a Fundacion YAXS investigation is invariably a practice shifting or fine tuning process. YAXS, through Paulina Zamora, mentors an artist to look at the foundation’s art and cultural archives from different perspectives, in order to arrive at work that can take off the mantel and taint of old outmoded paradigms, create something quite new and startlingly raw-skinned.
In the words of the foundation, “we are at a time when the arts are the last great territory of freedom of expression, and therefore, they must expand the breaking points that they exert on the system, strengthening the radical idea that artistic productions play a primordial role in the processes of subjectivation and socialization, and that art should be part of the symbolism of a culture not as an object of consumption but as an element for the construction of opinion, criteria and evaluation.”
THE SOLDIER IN THE MIRROR This investigation consisted not only of going to Guatemala, but of watching and studying a great number of propaganda films within the foundation’s archives, to “hartazgo,” or to that point beyond satiety. As an artist who addresses propaganda in its myriad of forms and effects, I ask — how can we process mixed truths, partial truths, created stories, denial stories of patterns of genocides, their causes, and their long elaborated historical foundations? Within the history of Guatemala, from the guerilla war, the toppled democratically elected president Jacabo Arbenz, the assassination of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, other political machinations, and United Fruit are disturbing parallels to my own Indonesian history.
We must consider our own role as an actor and consumer within the world theatre, whether intentional or not.
During the investigation, used US Military munition tins were obtained to be used not so much as decoys but as the vessel substitute — to shoot at within a 200 hundred yard range using .22 ammo. This action creates a series of examinations. The first examination is how rifle and shotgun feel in the hand, their power and inherent danger. Then the weapons force an almost automatic weighing and balancing of the role of self and the other, hunter and hunted, aggressor and victim, the strong and the weak. The third introspection is an almost Zen like state where the weapon and the human holding it almost become one; where every breath, every heartbeat is observed, significant, and must be completely in sync if the weapon is to find its mark. Lastly and chiefly, is the observation of the ingress and egress wounds of the bullets on the vessels, and the odd but potent realization the egress points are the gravest.If you know of who would be interested in showing this work, please let me know.
RESIDENCY The residency is housed in a revived colonial building in the heart of Zone 1 of Guatemala City. Inside the building are writers and definers of contemporary Latin American culture. Going to Guatemala was a revelation. I found a country rich in people and soul, but with deeply rooted challenges that forces awareness of how active and enduring must be our struggle for equity, which can only happen with an appreciation and discourse of past inequities and injuries.
I was fortunate to be able to be able to work with, under the auspices of Fundacion YAXS, artists Paolo Spalletti, Inez Verdugo, and Manuel Chavajay – in community engagement in San Pedro, on the sublime shores of Lake Atitlan, a place of spiritual and historical meaning.
