In 2013, Regina José Galindo attended the trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt and Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, who spearheaded the Guatemalan coup d’état in 1982 and then led the country until 1983. Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez spoke of how the army dug up mass graves, then murdered Indigenous Ixil Mayan peoples and threw their bodies into the pits. Both were ultimately acquitted.
Galindo, like many Guatemalans, was deeply disturbed by their testimony—and ended up making a performance in response to it. For a 2013 work known as Tierra, she stood naked in the middle of a field as a bulldozer dug up the ground all around her, creating a tiny island made of earth. She stood still for roughly a half-hour, her body as vulnerable as the surrounding land and the corpses of Ixil Mayans once buried in places like it.
For Galindo, the piece was a form of resistance. During the performance, which can now be seen via video documentation, she does not waver, even as the tractor brings its arm close above and around her. Galindo has practiced meditation exercises in which she imagines roots growing from her feet. Here, she clings to what little she has left.
More than a decade on, Tierra was recently presented at MoMA PS1 in New York earlier this year amid widespread talk of a different genocide, this one in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 40,000 people since the October 7 Hamas attack. In an interview with ARTnews, Galindo called the work “a piece that questions one genocide to question all the others.”
Moreover, she said, she wanted “to show an artwork where a woman shows her naked vulnerability, defending a piece of land, while every day we see men and women defending their land. It brings that dynamic where there can be interactions of solidarity between Guatemalans, the New York audience, and the people of Palestine. And also, the recognition of erased histories, of people who have been forgotten by empires and their history.”
To read full article, clic link below.
