Central America's step forward

The exhibition of the innovative project devised and produced by the Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation (AECID) is coming to an end: the exhibition with seven simultaneous venues on both sides of the Atlantic, which also concludes the celebrations of the Bicentenary of the Independence of the Central American countries.

Casa de América has been the chosen venue in Spain, along with six other AECID cultural centres in Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. With works on loan from the main national museums in each country, together with the authors themselves and private collections, this exhibition offers until 6 February the most vibrant panorama of contemporary art from one of the regions of the world that has suffered the most turbulence in the last two centuries.

Coordinated by the directors and curators of the project, Tamara Díaz Bringas and Ricardo Ramón Jarne, the title of this simultaneous multinational exhibition in seven countries and two continents is inspired by the phrase "The past is in front", with which the Mayan artist Benvenuto Chavajay refers to the culture and the way of understanding the past and the relationship with the ancestors. 

There is, in Casa América, his work El retorno de la silla, drawn on the back of a contemporary Guatemalan, in reference to the rebellion in 1820 of Atanasio Tzul and Lukas Akiral. It was then an indigenous cry against viceregal taxes, revived almost two hundred years later, in 2012 when an indigenous march, also in Totonicapán, was repressed in blood and fire for opposing the increase in electricity tariffs.

In the works exhibited there are fictions, invention or political imagination, but also concrete ways of sustaining life in common. Hence the use of materials (or their representations) such as earth, water, seeds or fluids such as blood or milk. Rolando Castellón, for example, has been working with clay since 1981, according to an ethics and ecology that he relates to Amerindian cultures.

The earth is also the material with which several artists work and the basis of ancestral practices such as geophagy, which Adán Vallecillo captures in photographs that he prints on cotton paper. The author describes geophagy as a practice of cultural resistance, which is nevertheless reviled by Western pseudo-humanism, which presents it as a consequence of hunger and poverty. In contrast to such a paternalistic view, this process of production and consumption of "earth biscuits" is highly complex and rooted in ancestral rituals, which refer to deep spiritual connections with the territory.

Other forms or imaginaries of healing are summoned in this exhibition, from certain rituals, narratives or words, to certain silences or escapes. In the absence of the term "art" in his language, Benvenuto Chavajay understands his work as a kind of "healer" of the colonial wound.

 The past forwards interrogates coloniality and its persistence in the unequal attribution of value to certain knowledge, modes of organisation, relationships or spirituality. In the works and in their tensions, non-extractive practices of relating to nature and other living beings take shape or desire.

 Particularly illustrative in this respect is Lucía Madriz's installation Tres hermanas, made with green corn, yellow corn, red, black and white beans, pumpkin seeds and earth. The three sisters is the name given to the way the milpa has been cultivated in Mesoamerica since pre-Hispanic times. Madriz wants to represent in it that agriculture is not only a necessary activity for survival but also a cultural legacy of ways of doing and seeing the world, an integral part of who we are.

 In addition to the aforementioned, other authors such as Ángel Poyón, Héctor Burke, Donna Conlon, Christian Salablanca, Patricia Belli, Guadalupe Maravilla, Natalia Dominguez and Simón Vega, make up this exhibition, attentive and committed to the ideological, political and social issues of our time.