Regina José Galindo, Performance Artist: “In Guatemala, we don’t live with the truth”

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In October 2000, the body of a woman, naked and in a fetal position, appeared in a clear plastic bag in Guatemala City’s municipal dump, like another piece of trash. The woman was Regina José Galindo, a Guatemalan artist born on August 27, 1974. The scene: part of one of her first performances, No perdemos nada con nacer (We Lose Nothing by Being Born), denouncing the wave of femicides that had been sweeping the country. That year alone, 213 women were violently murdered, according to a report by the Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres. Galindo sees her body as a canvas to display and perform her art, and sees art as a means to denounce Guatemala’s violent history — a country that, in her view, “does not live with the truth.”

In the late 1990s, Galindo worked at an advertising agency where she met two important friends —Jéssica Lagunas and María Adela Díaz— who would introduce her to contemporary art and its various expressive forms, including performance. In 1999, she made her first public interventions, and in April of that same year, Lagunas invited Galindo to participate in a collective exhibition titled Proyecto de Arte Independiente (PIA), hosted at the Edificio Mini in Guatemala City’s Zone 4. Galindo exhibited her own body, naked and blindfolded, her hands and feet tied to a bed mounted in an upright position, projecting scanned newspaper clippings with headlines alluding to femicides or rapes across her torso. It was her first performance: El dolor en un pañuelo (Pain in a Handkerchief). That same year, Galindo performed Lo voy a gritar al viento (I’m Going To Shout It to the Wind), as part of Guatemala’s II Festival del Centro Histórico, hanging herself in a harness from the Arco del Edificio de Correos de Ciudad de Guatemala —a large arch forming part of the capital city’s historic postal building— while reading poems denouncing violence into a microphone. As she explains in the following interview: “I’m interested in art that addresses power relations, justice, and memory, and that bears a social responsibility.”

The place of women in a society such as Guatemala’s —a society suffused with machismo and extreme inequality— is a recurring theme that runs through Galindo’s extensive oeuvre, which spans a 27-year career and multiple exhibitions in more than ten cities across the Americas and Europe. Galindo’s works are featured in collections at the Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim in New York City, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, and the Daros Collection in Switzerland, among others.

Regina Galindo is the daughter of former family-court judge Guillermo Galindo González, who died this year, and who had previously worked at the Guatemalan Supreme Court’s Torre de Tribunales, where he gained firsthand knowledge of the internal proceedings and eventual genocide conviction against military general and dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. “My parents never talked about the armed conflict, even though my father was an honest judge. You can always tell which judges are honest, because they don’t benefit financially,” she says. Galindo’s proximity to the justice system and her childhood exposure to the daily violence of the internal armed conflict inspired her obsession with exploring the wounds of Guatemala’s political and collective history through her art.

In 2003, in an act of protest against Ríos Montt’s presidential candidacy, Galindo walked barefoot from the Constitutional Court to the National Palace, dipping her feet in a bowl of human blood and leaving a trail of scarlet footprints as she went. In 2007, in a work titled Mientras, ellos siguen libres (Meanwhile, They Remain Free), she reenacted the testimonies of several pregnant Indigenous women who had survived sexual violence at the hands of Guatemalan soldiers during the armed conflict, denouncing the impunity of the perpetrators. Galindo, herself eight months pregnant at the time, used real umbilical cords to lash her hands and feet to the frame of a folding bed, replicating the position of the victims. In 2013, Galindo performed two works expressing the memory of the Ixil genocide: Tierra (Earth) and La verdad (The Truth). In the first —based, as always, on the testimonies of survivors— she highlighted one of the methods used by the Guatemalan Army to disappear the bodies of the Indigenous victims they murdered: an excavator dug a mass grave around the artist as she stood still on a small patch of earth. In the second —a response to the annulment of Ríos Montt’s genocide conviction— Galindo read an hour-long collection of testimonies recounting the horrific violence suffered by the Indigenous survivors who testified at the trial, while every ten minutes, a dentist injected anesthesia into her mouth in an attempt to silence her, her voice eventually devolving into a garble of indecipherable sounds.

Galindo’s subversive and often uncomfortable art brought her international recognition and, in 2005, the prestigious Golden Lion for Best Young Artist at the 51st Venice Biennale, for her works ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces?) and Himenoplastia (Hymenoplasty), a 2004 performance in which Galindo underwent reconstructive surgery on her hymen to become a virgin again, as a reflection on the imposition that women be virgins as a prerequisite for marriage. A year later, after becoming pregnant, Galindo sold her Golden Lion out of necessity, to the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra. And in 2012, with the help of Guatemalan artists and brothers Ángel and Fernando Poyón, she made a replica of the award, which remains in her possession to this day — a legacy, she says, for her daughter.

In the mid-20th century, artists in Europe and the United States began performing public artistic actions that involved the use of the body, everyday materials, and choreography, merging disciplines like music, theater, dance, sculpture, and painting. These experiments, dubbed “performance art,” involved artists conveying messages —often powerfully political ones— using their own bodies in the work. Examples can be found in the artistic productions of the German Joseph Beuys, the Serbian Marina Abramovich, and the Cuban-American Ana Mendieta. Regina José Galindo’s ideas and performances stem from this artistic movement.

On September 22, two reporters with El Faro interviewed Regina José Galindo at her home/studio in San Miguel Escobar, on the outskirts of Antigua Guatemala. Surrounded by papers with sketches and project plans, Galindo discussed the origins of her critical thinking, the social contexts that inspire her work, and the role of political art in a time of democratic crisis.

Why did you choose to work with performance and not some other kind of art?

In the late 1990s, the creative process I was closest to was the word. Poetry. In my first performance, El dolor en un pañuelo (Pain in a Handkerchief), I was experimenting, but I felt completely determined and seduced by the situation, by the experience, and by the medium. Then I did Lo voy a gritar al viento (I’m Going to Shout It to the Wind), which is also a piece on gender. I was highlighting how women’s voices are still getting lost in the wind. I did those pieces well before movements like Me Too came along. People weren’t talking about gender like they are today. The Femicide Law was passed in Guatemala in 2008. When performance came to me, I started developing my ideas through the body.

In performance, you invest a lot of time in thinking, in arriving at an idea, which is perhaps the most complex part of the process. Performance requires a lot of pre-production —to think about everything that might happen, and everything you need for developing the performance— but rehearsals are very rare. Performance is a much closer approximation of reality. I’m not playing a role. The work doesn’t require dramatization, staging, or gadgets. It relies on the body and the body’s energy to convey a message to the audience. It’s the purest way of conveying a message. It’s the most direct medium I know.

We’ll talk about some of your specific works later, but throughout your career, your central focus has always been on Guatemala’s historical memory and collective tragedies. Why have you devoted so much time and work to exploring your country’s darkest memories?

I was born in 1974, during the worst years of the war. My generation grew up in silence. We normalized war. We saw the tanks, the soldiers, the military checkpoints set up in broad daylight, the bombings in the city center, the bodies dumped in ditches like it was the most natural thing in the world. And you’d read the headlines in the news, but there was never any mention of a war. They’d say things like “Body appears disfigured,” and would speak of generalized violence. We normalized all of that. I studied at the French Lycée in Zone 1, during the years when bombs were going off downtown. I must have been ten or eleven years old. Glass shattered at our school, and we had to stay late because the streets were occupied by soldiers. It was normal to see that chaos, that noise, that fear in the eyes of your family. I had an older brother who studied at the USAC [San Carlos University], Fernando Galindo, and I remember how worried my mother would get, because he was involved in the student movements. I would watch her cry, wondering if he’d been trapped at the university. We grew up with this. We didn’t wonder if things were okay or not. Things just happened. I realized the reality of the situation when I was 19 or 18, when I came across a book by Rigoberta Menchú, Así me nació la conciencia [published in English in 1984 as I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala]. That was when I understood what was happening in the Indigenous communities, which are just a few kilometers from here, but I had no idea about that reality. About the war that was ravaging the bodies of the Indigenous communities. My parents were middle class; they didn’t talk about the war.

Do you think it’s still important, so many years later, to talk about the armed conflict?

Absolutely. That history has been silenced. The genocide is still being denied. We had a trial in 2013 and a trial last year, and both were annulled. In Guatemala, we don’t live with the truth. If you ask a kid at a school in Guatemala City, they won’t be able to tell you anything about the genocide, because it’s not something that is taught. And the people responsible for the war are still in positions of power. The war is the reason we live the way we live today. But the people who don’t remember, who weren’t told about it, who didn’t read about it, who lived with their backs turned to the reality of it, who haven’t had the opportunity to learn about it — they don’t make this connection.

In your 2013 performance La Verdad, you denounced the injustice suffered by the victims the Ixil genocide. For one hour, you read the narratives of survivors who testified at the genocide trial of dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, while a dentist injected anesthesia into your mouth every ten minutes. What did that performance involve, and how did you prepare for it?

It was like undergoing real surgery. They had to perform lung and heart tests on me. During the performance, they put me on a blood pressure monitor. I held out for twenty-one doses of anesthesia, but when my blood pressure started to drop, the doctor decided to end the performance.

I attended the trial against Ríos Montt. It was painful to listen to the translations of the women’s testimonies, to hear their realities from their own mouths. In one of the testimonies, which I read as part of the performance, a woman recounted how a group of soldiers raped her daughter, one after another, and how they split her in two, and before that, how the girl cried out to her mother in agony, ‘¡mamá ayudame!” “Mom, help me!” and how the mother could never forget the phrase because it was the last thing her daughter said. When I heard this, I cried. An Indigenous woman sitting next to me took my hand and told me, in Spanish, with a strong Mayan accent: “Don’t cry, don’t cry. We are here to fight.” And that really affected me. I understood then, that they weren’t hiding their tears, they were saving them for the right moment, because there’s a time for everything, and that moment, in that space, was a time for struggle. What these women needed was the strength to stand up and speak their voices, because they had already had to tell their stories a hundred times over, in that trial plagued with corruption and abuses. They made them come and go a million times.

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After the trial, I went to the courthouse to talk with my dad, and before the verdict was handed down and the sentence pronounced, he told me: “I don’t want to upset you, but you should know the ruling won’t favor the communities. A lot of suitcases have been carried into the courthouse, and you know what they contain” [a reference to bribes]. The day Judge Jazmín Barrios handed down the verdict, convicting military leaders Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez of genocide, was a tremendous day. The celebration, the joy, the feeling of having achieved something for the first time... but that only lasted ten days, and then they overturned the sentence. But really, the feeling that we were losing began the day after the ruling. The city woke up plastered in billboards that read “We Guatemalans are not genocidal.” It was the beginning of a campaign, paid for by the oligarchy and aimed at convincing the population to push back against the ruling.

When the conviction was overturned a few days later, I realized that my father had been right. But I was still deeply moved by what the case had meant, and I began working on several projects, such as Tierra (Land). I wanted to talk about land dispossession, about the economic drivers of genocide. The motive behind the mass murder of Indigenous people in Guatemala was to steal their land. And the Army did the dirty work. We always talk about the men who do the dirty work, but it’s much harder to talk about or accuse the intellectual authors.

In response to the annulment of the genocide conviction against Efraín Ríos Montt, Regina José Galino staged the performance La verdad (The Truth) in 2013. For one hour, she read a collection of testimonies from survivors of the Ixil genocide who had testified at the trial, while every ten minutes, a doctor injected anesthesia into her mouth in an attempt to silence her. The artist endured 21 doses. Video: Courtesy/José Juárez.

Your performances are social experiments. In Angelina (2001), you dressed as a domestic worker and lived your daily life like that for a month. What have you learned from doing performances like that?

That was a pretty original project for its time. Selfies and cell phones didn’t exist like they do now. Neither did reality shows. It was an experience that changed my life, at least for that one month, because people saw me differently, and when others see you differently, you respond according to how you’re seen. Everything around me changed. I wasn’t allowed into certain places, certain nightclubs. When I would go to restaurants with my partner, people would stare at us. He was tall, mestizo, white. They looked at me weird because I drove a car, even though it was old. I had a cell phone, which was unusual at the time. I was like a transgressive, emancipated domestic worker. I also made friends. I remember how construction workers, who would normally harass me aggressively on the street, were much friendlier to me when I was a domestic worker. When I went to buy fruit or bread at the market, the other women and vendors talked to me like we were equals. One even invited me out for a beer. I also sought out places where I felt more comfortable. When I went to those other places, like nightclubs, it was to see what would happen. I expected not to be let into certain places. Guatemala is a very racist and classist society. If I did it again today, the same thing would happen.

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In 2005, you won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for performances about historical memory and violence. What did winning that award mean for your career?

It was a radical, life-changing event. I didn’t understand what the prize meant when I won it. I was 32 years old. I had already been to the Bienniale once and I understood the importance of the exhibition. I was more responsible with my projects, I had a better understanding of art. The first time I went was in 1999. I was very young. I had done a total of three performances in my life. When I won the prize, an Italian gallerist, Ida Pisani from Prometeo Gallery, which is still my gallery, approached me and offered me a two-year salary to pursue my projects, and that’s how I got started. The Golden Lion gave me the opportunity to live as an independent artist.

A while after you won, you had a replica of the Golden Lion made. Why did you do that?

In 2005, when I won the Golden Lion, I was at the Biennale party with Santiago Sierra, a Spanish artist, and he told me that he’d buy the Lion from me. I told him no way, that he was crazy. Then, in 2006, I got pregnant while I was living in the Dominican Republic. Months passed and I had already left advertising, and I wanted to return to Guatemala to be with my family, so I decided to sell the Golden Lion. I called him. He had offered me a certain amount of money, but I asked for double. He bought it from me, and uses it in his art. He exhibited the Golden Lion and sold it for twice as much as he’d paid me. I fell into the trap, but I needed the money. Six years later, my daughter had grown up, and I was invited to the Biennale again, and it made me feel nostalgic. Generally, when an artist wins the Golden Lion, like Marina Abramovich, their works start to sell for more—50,000 euros in her case. I was finally able to work independently, but my work was still selling for cheap. Working with the same gallery, we learned together, and I continued to rely on the monthly support from my Italian gallery.

In 2012, I asked the Prometeo Gallery to provide me with the measurements of the Golden Lion. They took photos and measurements, sent them to me, and I commissioned a friend here in Guatemala, Fernando Poyón, an artist from Comalapa, to make an exact replica of the statuette. It was a long process. The replica has a clay core. From there, he made a bronze mold and then sent that to be coated in pure, 24-karat Guatemalan gold. Then, at the next Bienniale I was invited to, I presented El falso León (The False Lion). I still have that Lion, and my dream is that when I die, it will be worth as much or more than the original one, because I’m going to leave this Lion to my daughter. I made it so that I would have something to leave her.

Your performances often create situations and feelings of extreme physical or psychological discomfort. Do you have a philosophy that guides how you approach pain through your art?

This is a common misinterpretation of my work. I’ve been doing performance art for 26 years and over the course of more than a hundred projects, pain has been a part of only two or three of them, but these projects have been decisive in my career, so they’ve skewed the perspective on my work. It’s the same with nudity. Not all of my work involves nudity, and I’m not interested in exploring pain. In the works Himenoplastia (Hymenoplasty) and Perra (Bitch), pain was a necessary part of executing the performance. It wasn’t the purpose.

In Himenoplastia, I went through surgery to become a virgin again. The pain was incidental. If I could’ve had the surgery without pain, I would have chosen that. I wasn’t interested in the pain. But the anesthesia, the injections, the procedure, which was super bloody, of course all of that was painful. On another occasion, responding to the bodies found mutilated and marked with words like “malditas perras” (“fucking bitches”), I decided to carve the word perra into my leg with a knife, and even I couldn’t have imagined how much it would hurt. In the video they filmed, you can see how tense I was. After I cut the first line, I remember thinking, “I must be crazy!” because it hurt so much. It was really hard to do. Not just the pain, but the act of convincing my hand to inflict the pain on myself. I was fighting with my own mind. Ultimately it was the pressure from the audience — I was already doing the performance, and I wasn’t going to back out. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have gone through with it. But the pain was just a necessary step to complete the performance. Again, I’m not interested in exploring pain.

Have you ever faced censorship? 

In Spain, they censored my work on disappearances. In Valladolid. I was planning on digging a three-meter-deep mass grave, but when I got to the city, they told me it wasn’t going to happen. I demanded that they pay me. They said —in a city where there are never any earthquakes— that it was dangerous to dig a grave because of potential seismic activity. But the truth is that some Francoist groups were opposed to it, and were pressuring them not to let me do it. Another time, here in Guatemala, when I raised a black and white flag in Xela, they censored it. The governor ordered it taken down. Which of course brought even more attention, and people from other organizations asked me if they could borrow it, and they waved it during the [Independence Day] parade on September 15, along with replicas of the flag... until it was confiscated. Then we flew it during the 2017 protests, when Jimmy Morales expelled the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala from the country. We hung it on the flagpole in the city’s central park, and some guys climbed up to take it down. They looked like soldiers. They had all the qualities of soldiers. They climbed the pole, without any harnesses, took it down, and confiscated it. I still don’t know where it is.

Another theme in your work is the migration crisis. Given the current political climate in the United States, with Trump in power, are you reconsidering doing more performance?

Yeah, for sure. I did a few projects on migration during Trump’s first term, and yes, when I go through an airport in the U.S., I’m afraid that they might demand I hand over my phone. A few galleries have already rejected some of my projects because of their political content. It happened to me with the issue of Palestine. I wanted to do a performance about arms embargos in countries that continue to supply weapons to Israel, and they told me, “No, another project, please,” without openly censoring me.

Do you consider yourself a conceptual artist?

No. I work with contextual art. I’m a visual storyteller. I try to make my messages very simple, very precise, and very easy to interpret. That said, I’m not anyone’s teacher, and I can’t demand that people think how I want them to; everyone is free to form their own opinions. In the moment of performance, the viewer is free to make their own interpretation, which is also influenced by the context that surrounds them.

So, you’re interested in democratizing your work?

That’s one way of putting it. I prefer working in public spaces, rather than institutional spaces like museums or galleries. I know how to work in those spaces, too, and I like doing it, but when I’m able to develop my own work —when I come up with ideas for projects I can perform in Guatemala, and that I produce myself— I usually perform them in public spaces for a non-specialized audience. I find that I get a more human response. The audience might not understand it as an act of performance art, but they’ll understand that it’s an aesthetic experience: something that stands out from their everyday lives, something that they talk about with their families over dinner, and that’s when art really starts to resonate.

Are you saying that you’re thinking, for example, about how to make your work more accessible to popular, working-class audiences?

I’m thinking about the importance of connecting with people through art, through poetry, through human acts, through the human connection that happens via performance. Breaking down social differences and speaking more horizontally. This is possible, but only outside the space of the museum, because museums can be intimidating. A lot of people are scared to go into a museum or gallery. Another reason I try to be closer to people is that my ideas come from society. I don’t give a voice to anyone. The people living their lives on the street and suggesting ideas to me are the ones giving me a voice, because my work is rooted in the experiences of others. In the experiences of people who already have a voice, who have already spoken, who have already lived, who have already expressed themselves, who are already fighting. I don’t give a voice to anyone; I’m sustained by the voices of others.

You started performing in an analog era, in the late 1990s. Since then, the world has changed quite a bit. Now, in the digital age, it’s harder to capture people’s attention, because everyone has already seen it all on their screens. People are no longer so easily shocked. Over the course of your career, have you felt this change through the reception of your work?

I haven’t noticed any difference between performing then and today. Of course, artists are responsible for knowing what’s happening in other parts of the world, and now we have more information that we have to respond to. Not just local issues, but also what’s happening globally. And everything is connected to the conflicts happening in other parts of the world. I believe that art should seek not only to shock or awe, but also to make people think. Some works will have a shock effect and then you analyze and reflect on that, but art is meant to make you think. As artists, we know that we can’t necessarily depend on the kind of audience that’s constantly scrolling their screens; instead, we rely on the people who will take the time, who have a sensitive interest in the image or the story. It’s like hoping that, when I perform in a public space, everyone will be moved by the work, or will stop what they’re doing. There are a thousand people out on the street, and maybe ten will turn to look at me. The same thing happens on social media, which is the new public space.

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In 2025, you staged a performance titled Primavera democrática (Democratic Spring), which is not only a reflection on gender violence, but also on the current political situation in Guatemala. The text that accompanies the work reads: “Today, Guatemala’s democratic spring is just an idea that never blossomed.” What has been the response to this piece?

When I wrote that text, we weren’t as thoroughly disappointed as we are today. Bernardo Arévalo has proven himself to be just another diplomat. He hasn’t gotten his hands or his tie dirty. He hasn’t rolled up his sleeves. Despite the amendments he’s passed, the mining industry continues to hold power. The disappointment has been a slow drip. This government is the result of our efforts, and the efforts of the Indigenous people of Guatemala. We were the ones at the protests day and night. We are part of the movement that brought Arévalo to power. And when he won the election, I was happy to say, “Holy shit, I have a government that I voted for and believe in for the first time in my life.” It was an incredible feeling, after fifty years of disastrous governments that served the interests of the military and the oligarchy. The optimism was overwhelming.

But Arévalo hasn’t lifted a finger. He’s too busy with diplomacy, and aligning himself with the United States and its erratic decisions, like singing the praises of María Corina Machado, or that terrible and tepid decision to abstain from voting at the U.N. in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state. That was the last straw. When I did that performance, I still had a little hope. I could feel the death and sadness and the pause on progress, but there was still a sense of hope, that the spring could still come. I no longer feel that.

Guatemala is a country with a strong and long-standing military tradition. As an artist, how do you relate to a context in which the military is a constant presence?

My relationship with the Army has to do with how I naturalized things in the past and grew up with them. It doesn’t scare me to see a soldier with an armored vehicle and a Galil rifle. I grew up seeing soldiers with Israeli weapons. After the signing of the peace agreement, those soldiers became privatized police. Figures of perverted power have been a constant presence in our national lives. It’s hard for a Guatemalan to be shocked by simply seeing them in society. When people come to visit, on the other hand, one of the first things they’ll often say to us is how horrible it is to see so many armed men with high-caliber weapons in the city. And the response is always, “Oh, yeah, that’s nothing.” We’ve normalized violence and acts of repressive power in Guatemala.

How do you understand the use of violence as spectacle and entertainment in mass media? How is your work different from that?

Intentionality is important. And the intentionality of an artist is not entertainment. Using violence to make television, or when movies normalize war or brainwash people to see the United States as the center of power, is an effective strategy for stirring up strong emotions and giving people an adrenaline rush when they think about the nation. But an artist has other intentions. Telling a story. Showing something from a different perspective. Challenging and questioning. In my case, I use violence in my work when it’s necessary to tell a story, to talk about a fact or an event.

When I did Confession —the performance where a volunteer subjected me to the torture technique known as waterboarding— the volunteer lost control in the middle of the performance and drowned me more times than we had stipulated. There was already an act of power at play in that moment. He was overcome by adrenaline. But my interest in performing the piece was to tell the story of the United States torturing war suspects in the Middle East. That’s what was happening. And it was being denied. Torture was being normalized. I performed the piece in Spain because that’s where the CIA’s secret flights were taking people, but I was talking about an experience that, as a Guatemalan, I had the authority to speak about, because that method of torture was also practiced here in Guatemala, as we know from declassified documents. I wasn’t interested in suffering violence. I’m not a masochist. I was interested in saying that this happened in Guatemala, and was happening in the country —Spain— where I had been invited to do the performance.

Does art have a responsibility with respect to justice and judicial processes?

Art does not have the capacity to deliver justice. This would be giving it too great a responsibility. But it agitates. It triggers thought, discussion, debate, and critical thinking. It inspires people to see situations from other perspectives, to observe things differently. I’m interested in art that addresses power relations, justice, and memory, and that bears a social responsibility. I’m interested in rebellious art. Art that, in addition to performing a creative function, also engages with society.

Here in Guatemala, there have been many artistic attempts at addressing the armed conflict, but even now, after 30 years, power has only grown more powerful. The fact that we lost two trials, so many years apart, is a strong indicator of who is still in power, and how the oligarchy continues to exert its voice and vote in the state.

Have you ever been interested in pursuing politics from a position in public office?

No. Above all, I’m concerned with defending creative freedom. Art is the only developmental space where the individual is free. The artists I’m most interested in are the ones who make art like they’re throwing bombs. Who are politically and socially committed. Who have a clear position and use themselves as a tool for fighting injustice. Those should be the guiding ideals of an artist, because people listen to artists. In other words, if you’re a painter, people go to your exhibitions and take the time to understand what you’re saying through your work. You earn the public’s time, so, as artists, we have a responsibility to that time. Art has the power to make itself heard.

Do you think there are still some topics that artists in Guatemala are afraid to touch?

Yes, there’s a lot of fear — or I’m afraid, at least. How many Guatemalan journalists are in exile for denouncing corruption? There is a crisis unfolding in Guatemala. It feels like the Giammattei administration never really ended. They’re like octopuses, holding onto power in the Judicial Branch and the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Just look at the case of Jose Rubén Zamora.

What does Jose Rubén Zamora’s imprisonment mean to you, as an artist?

It’s a warning and a testament to the reality that, in Guatemala, you can’t speak freely. You can talk about a lot of issues, but not about the corruption of the oligarchic classes. They’re untouchable. As a journalist, Zamora was dedicated to exposing corruption in Guatemala across administrations and within the oligarchic families, and he made a lot of enemies. It’s a response to all the hostile reactions he provoked with his journalism. But the attacks against Zamora didn’t start yesterday. He’s faced persecution during every administration. He’s always been a fighter.

Currently, Central America as a region appears to be experiencing some hostile political circumstances. What role does art play in a time of crisis like the one we’re experiencing now?

There are distinct powers in Central America. There’s Nicaragua, which is not left-wing. When people talk about the Nicaraguan radical left, my response is always that Nicaragua isn’t even a shadow of what Sandinismo used to be. That’s just a misconception perpetuated by those in power. People hate the Left for the wrong reasons. I’m still left-wing, but Ortega isn’t left-wing. He’s a corrupt dictator, and a rapist. Then we have Bukele, who is a monster. Another dictator. And here in Guatemala, under a progressive government… let’s see, well, we have a lot of grey areas and we’re all fucked, living under the yoke of corruption. We have to ask ourselves: Who’s actually governing? Artists have a responsibility in this crisis, but not all artists have ethical principles. Creative practice in and of itself doesn’t necessarily entail social and ethical responsibility; that’s up to each individual. I’m someone with clear ethical principles and an interest in political issues, which is reflected in what I do, what I say, what I express, what I work on. But there are artists who don’t have that. I tend to lean toward artistic trends and artists that, in addition to engaging in formal practice, also engage in critical thinking.

*Translated by Max Granger