Guinea Gil, Pilar

My thesis research is an investigation of Guatemala’s history, where I am from. I do this in resistance to silence, venerating and collaborating with my ancestors. The silence I speak of is a Guatemalan characteristic that entails never speaking about trauma. The trauma of violence, war and the wounds left by the colonization of indigenous peoples by the Spanish. This silence exists in my home were the recent war is seldom talked about, it exists in school classrooms where we are not taught history, and it exists in the public as forms of self hate and neglect of the other. But this silence is broken by the iq’ (wind) on the day of the dead. During the celebrations for the day of the dead in Guatemala, communities gather each year on November the 1st to construct giant kites that with their flight take messages to the dead. But within these messages there exists resistance. I am using the idea of the kite to venerate and communicate with the people of the CIRMA archive (center for mesoamerican research), that is an archive of guatemalan history through the lense of a camera. The photographs of the archive are witnesses of history, they break the silence and deny the lies. I have separated this archive in two group, the perpetrators that stand as witnesses, and the photographs that symbolize collective memories and ancestors whom I wish to venerate in the creation of a memory sculptures that function as kites that cannot fly. The heaviness of their material, that of the cement and steel ground the kites to the earth as symbols of what repression and silence can create. I hope that by the creation of these sculptures I am able to resurrect these spirits and celebrate them in hopes that their memory can be not only acknowledged, but released.