sueños
guardados en
granos de maíz
an exhibition by Edgar Calel22.FEB.2025 — 26.APRIL.2025
Healing over battlefields
On Dreams stored in Corn Grains by Edgar Calel
On Dreams stored in Corn Grains by Edgar Calel
- Agustin Pérez Rubio
Whatever word I may use to describe, mediate, understand or expand knowledge about the being and work of whom we can call, under western logic, Maya-Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel, will only be an elusive approach. Utterly fleeting and very limited in essence. His persona involves something more than what we understand as a simple visual artist, even more so, because art as we understand it here does not exist in his vocabulary— that of the Mayan languages — which is why his practice is usually referred to as Naoj: a combination of knowledge, wisdom and understanding.
Calel is much more than what we in the West may know as similar. If we were to grasp his practice and translate it —despite its impossibility— it would be closer to the integral practice of what we call ethics in philosophy, posthumanist thought or of an ecofeminist theory; between the poet that he is, and the storyteller, the fabulist, as a person with a gift for the spoken word; to a magician of untranslatable signs in decolonial hermeneutics; to the linguistic activist who wears the richness and diversity of words embroidered on his attire; to the image-maker who produces and signs with the imprint of his body on the earth; to the critic of new ways of living in counter-hegemonic resistance through art; the preserver and maintainer of past heritages made present; the ritualist who thwarts both the institution and the very category of action or performance; the blessed one, who heals and gives thanks for what has been given to him.... Without of course forgetting about, the grandson, the son, the brother and heir of what it means to be Kaqchikel. Because his power lies in collective practice, in understanding a way of creating as a family. All this and much more is what defines Edgar Calel, knowing that any reflection he makes or says, unfortunately, will always dwarf and try to mould him to a canon that does not designate him, nor identify him, just as the imposed word ‘indigenous’ does not really define him, because it is precisely a definition created by our hegemonic power.
Calel is an artist who subdues many of his works to a questioning of language, and makes use and abuse of it, questioning precisely the essence of impositions, and how these fluctuate between the symbolic system and its political action. In addition to proposing a negotiating exercise in delving into the untranslatability of specific ways of being in the world —and the words that name them —I consider it pertinent to incorporate the testimony of the Mixe activist and philologist, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, in order to better frame the definition of communities and cultures, such as that of the Mayan-Kaqchikel from which the artist comes from, and to glimpse a more permeable horizon of understanding. The author, faced with the initial rejection of the word ‘indigenous’, understands it now as a word that names nations, people and communities that underwent processes of colonisation. Moreover, in the processes of shaping modern nation states, indigenous nations were forced to remain within these juridical entities; these states have fought against their existence and relate to them through oppression. This is something we cannot ignore when discussing the Calel family’s processes, both experiential and artistic, and the complexity of their work, which brings closer the distant gap of this subjugation without qualms, yet without forgetting.
Listening to Calel, whether in words or through sight or smell, is to listen to the earth, to listen collectively; it is to open a portal where past, present and future come together in the context of Chixot —what we know in imposed language as San Juan de Comalapa in the Guatemalan highlands— and its Kaqchikel culture. We are unable to understand his practice without understanding the heritage of his ancestors —the Mayan mythologies and spiritual practices that are perpetuated in communities despite coloniality; or his closest predecessors, such as his paternal grandmother María Luisa López Cujcuy, with whom the whole family lived until the end of her days, at the age of ninety-two. From whom Edgar Calel learned greatly about knowledge and attitudes towards life. She is eternally honoured through a drawing of the sound she herself made to call the birds and feed them corn. Today it has become a mural made of earth, which brings her existence to life on the façade of her house, cacophonously reproducing her own Kit Kit Kit song ‘so that the colour of the earth would be the colour of her voice’; or her orographic environment, a land where volcanoes are part of her landscape and where they take force in the cosmogonic and cultural tradition of her relationship with the natural environment. Now reinterpreted by Calel in stones with perpetual fire as he did for the Sculpture Centre in New York with his project B'alab'äj (Jaguar Stone) or in his installation Ni Musmut (It's Breezing) at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway; but also the way in which his culture honours and protects, that which we in the West believe we may have invented with the term ‘politics of care’. Something that the Mayan and other pre-Hispanic cultures had already constituted thousands of years ago, for centuries. A way of being and being with the world. Taking care of the environment, with an experience close to nature, to the context in which they were born and the land which gives them what they need to live. Providing them with food, and in order to take care of it, they perform rituals in which they thank and return their generosity. Because, as Calel himself constantly affirms, ‘Not all things are for sale’.
This contrasts with the fast-paced, forgetful and ungrateful neoliberal context of the West in the face of its own destruction. A necro-capitalism that destroys that which gives us life, separating us from the earth and making us forget our past —even our elders—, along with relationships of equity and respect. The philosopher and statesman Wyandot Kondiarot, in the late 17th century, already highlighted the lack of understanding that European societies had for their equals, for notions of equality, freedom and respect. Even the importance and wisdom of these notions no longer seems to matter in the face of the novelty of youth and the immediacy of liquid screens on social networks. Sometimes, they only replicate over and over again experiences that we have had before in different contexts, regardless of the past of others. Forgetting and not honouring the previous legacy. Something which is fundamentally incomprehensible in the essence of the Calel family's collective experience and practice. For this reason, their artistic proposals makes us understand that, in face of the colonial experiences of their subjugated people, and under our narcissistic Eurocentric gazes, there is another way of understanding the complexity of the world. Leading him to weave a work between the protection of oneself against the injustices of the past-present, while acting and interfering in the direct processes of enunciation, —stimulating and proposing new rules—, where his works go beyond a simple artistic gesture, and are assimilated to rules or protocols for the common welfare.
A good example of this can be seen in the performative film Xar-Sueño de obsidiana [Xar-Obsidian Dream], 2020 made together with the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Pereira dos Santos and presented for the first time at the 11th Berlin Biennale, in the midst of the pandemic that immobilised us —one of the germs that triggered this project. First of all, the film highlights forms of creation through dreams —even in some ancestral cultures such as the Mapuche, dreams are considered tools of divination and healing, used by the Machis of the communities—, but opposed to any epistemological relation to what we have constructed in the West from Freud to Lacan, passing through surrealism or other practices. Far removed from all this, being both knowledgeable and critical towards Western modernity, this countercurrent walk —which the artist performs covered and protected by the jaguar's skin— through the iconic and pristine modernist building of Niemeyer's Sao Paulo Biennial, involves interference by placing the body in those spaces in which it has never had a place. Placing before us the evidence of an erasure, of a whitish manner of art, as the skin of the building reveals the colour of the Paulist oligarchy’s hegemony and of the Western art world that has turned towards critical judgement and the aesthetics of taste, and towards artistic trends and movements. Wandering in this way, where the artist becomes an animal, is a game of hunter and hunted. For there is no more colonial furniture than a cabinet in which to place the shames of plundered ostentation. Or a transparent building in which to observe and direct the wills of the bemused and intellectualoid public. Calel, far from the anodyne action of contemplation — as we always do when we go looking for new talents, whether at fairs or biennials —, devotes himself to visualising the place based on habits, forms of organisation, including play, as if the building didn't exist and was the garden or the forest used by the inhabitants in pre-colonial times. At the same time, he places it in time and space in relation to ancestors and generates a kind of rapprochement and brotherhood with them.
Another offering and resistance within Calel's art is seen in his piece Ru k'ox k'ob'el jun ojer etemab'el [The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge], 2021. An installation conceived as a ritual offering where, according to the artist, ‘we make these sacrifices to the stones, we offer them fruits, incense, liquor, tobacco and words. It is in them that the Ancestors come to take refuge, to have a body, so that we can make physical contact with them’. Even if at first glance it looks like an installation of Still Lifes, it is precisely a reversal of these Eurocentric notions of art, where what is depicted is not the ostentation of plunder or exoticised greed, but the gratitude of caring for the earth, the gift that Pachamama —or more accurately, es employed in various Mayan languages as: Ri Loq'oläj qate' Ruach'ulew / Our Sacred Mother Earth— gives us. A collective bond of union with all that has befallen us, for we all belong to those who have succeeded us. In this sense, Calel and his community have marked a milestone in the ways of understanding the relationships between the market, institutions and art productions of indigenous communities. His work always questions, in multiple ways, individualistic notions of production — manifesting itself not only as a communal form of production in which his whole family participates and which is related to the activities that produce and maintain life in his context — but questioning with this work the notion of ownership by reaching an agreement with the Tate Modern in London for its custody —neither an acquisition nor a purchase— for thirteen years. With this gesture Calel makes a pause, bringing the capitalist system and the voracious hunger of the institutional market to a halt. By making us all understand, teaching us all, about what an invitation, the work and the exhibition of certain objects and rituals —belonging to certain indigenous communities— implies within the institutional museum system and its collections in the Global North.
…..
Dreams stored in corn grains, is the title the artist has given to his first solo exhibition in Spain, after having recently visited London, where he installed his piece in the collection of the Tate Modern, and performed a ritual together with his brother Julio Calel. He had previously been in Mexico, via Comalapa, before embarking to Europe. These seemingly incidental or unimportant details are a fundamental part of the working process for this exhibition, as it is crucial to understand that Calel is an artist in constant movement. Curious to know and learn about things that are not part of his culture, sowing new relationships based on places, stories and events that occur to him. Likewise, the metaphor sustained in the exhibition’s title relates the mind and knowledge with nature. The analogy between grains and desire or knowledge are resources for sowing relationships that help us to better understand the reality that surrounds us.
Interested by the notion of knowledge exchange and the connotations that the same work acquires in different contexts and in what we call situated knowledge, Calel travels to places bringing back things with him. Both in his head and in his suitcase. Although this is not the first time he has visited Spain, he does so now aware that his arrival is akin to that of one who plants a seed. Most of his production takes place in the very same place where he is. It is a practice in situ —as in this case—understanding the importance that both the ideas and the resulting works materialise when they take root, when he is in situ. Because it is ‘when we embrace themes and say things, that things gain strength... The memory and the air of where I am is the only thing that’s mine’.
In these constant back and forth between places, the amate vegetal papers —a material that was used since pre-Hispanic times, as its etymological origin comes from the Náhutl for the ojotes or white and red ficus— with which both codices and offerings were made, and which survives in the practices of the Otomí community in Puebla, was bought by the artist in Mexico City along with various copies of pre-Hispanic Mexican codices (Florentine, Badiano-de la Cruz, Borgia, Nuttall, etc.). Furthermore, he also acquired a copy of an important document like the Popol Vuh, in order to re-read it —one of the many copies that the artist has had throughout his life and which he is now returning once again, as he is interested in researching further this important document — which he now takes as inspiration for some of these drawings. The artist is interested in the content, the materiality and what is derived from the research —which was done by people who did not speak the language — and where new readings are now being discovered from the research carried out by those who still speak the language, without the contamination of translation. The text can now be read in its purity and with additional contributions. That's why the artist makes a parallel between this new research in order to relate it to the field of the sociology of art: ‘I think it's the same with art. Things have a certain reading from where they are produced or thought about and from other places. That is why it is interesting to know that the works of an indigenous Kaqchikel artist are produced with materials found on the opposite side of the continent, the materials and the ideas come together so that the works can have a body, a voice, a message and a spirit.’.
On their recent visit to the Museo de América in Madrid in order to see the Madrid Codex, belonging to the Mayan cultures, Calel and his brother Julio suffered a strong emotional and even physical impact, seeing so much containment and so much knowledge frozen in those cold display cases that show copies of the original text, which is kept in the museum's vault. The somatisation of this episode made them consider how to make evident the existing coloniality while attempting to exorcise the violent charge of it. For this reason, we observe how he redraws the fire that appears in the codex. To paint these flames is a way of giving continuity to the fire that has never been extinguished in the communities, despite all the situations that the Mayan people have suffered and been through. The artist subverts colonial perpetuity by drawing on the amate, for ‘this fire is firmly lit in Comalapa, and I, through art, bring a portable fire to meet around it, to warm our spirits’. If at that time this type of bark was written and painted on, Calel takes it from a contemporary present to go beyond technique per se, to apprehend it as form of thought and healing.
Likewise, the artist places at the entrance of the exhibition a rock hung on a swing next to plants and medicinal herbs, as an entrance to a space that evokes the ancestors, ritually purifying the space. In addition, he creates an atmosphere of purification by means of incense burners scattered around the space where copal, sage or incense adhere to the walls of the exhibition so that visitors enter the exhibition through smell. To an offering made with the objects of our time. The artist, in the communal ethic that characterises him, does not offer for sale the ritual performed with a rock from the Valmayor reservoir in Madrid deliberately, but offers the option of documenting it as a contemporary ritual by drawing on amate. In this sense he breaks the geopolitical and chronological limits of the West with this inverse twist in the representation of a stone from Madrid and a ritual performed in the present. Between the cloud, the landscape of the local land that provides a welcome and offers a perspective to the installation, with the spirit that wraps us in the natural context that surrounds Calel and his family.
With these small gestures —as in many of his works— Calel questions the foundations of modernity to which we are grounded. He wanders through the city thinking both about how our cities were built, in this case in Madrid, and about the construction of its urban history, its rural memory and intimate history. Hence, his steps take him to the streets and expose, through his footsteps, the reaffirmation of a being in his photographs, where the fire of the fires —perhaps perpetrated in the past on the towns and settlements where he comes from— is partially hidden with the foot of the skylight on the pavement floor, where we can now read ‘In-Dios (Indios)’[literally translatable as: In-God]. A double play on words, not only as a self-affirmation of ethnicity or imposed denomination, but because in Kachiquel ‘In’ means ‘I am’. Thus , it can also be read as ‘I am God’, stepping on top of today's colonial fire. All this makes reference to the way in which Calel leaves an imprint with his art, for while painting in the western canon is based on putting an imprint on art, putting the footprints of the soles of the feet where leaves grow on them or doing it directly with the very earth of the place, is to put an imprint on life. These actions, which he sometimes does with his own feet —as is the case here— are often performed collectively, asking his whole family to walk on the canvases, even if before this he had done it as a video action more than a decade ago. He did it, as an exchange, with the Guarani Kaiowa community —between Brazil and Paraguay— which is captured in his video with the suggestive title Qetalh ri qa Winaqi pa Säq siwan (The trace of our people in the white abyss), 2014. A relationship, that of the blank canvas or paper, with the sensation of the abyss beneath your feet, as there was never any history, references and questions that sustained the portrait of these communities. Only ventriloquely did we know of the portrait, or the trace of them. In turn, this video is also a call for that peer-to-peer exchange, a remembrance and a way of thinking about twinning in a positive way. For that reason, the artist himself later on wrote about it the following lines:
‘I delivered seeds and received the shape of feet marked with earth, with red soil from a Guarani Kaiowa community. With this gesture we affirm our particular way of seeing and making life, together with the land and the seeds that sustain our existence and autonomy.
Coinciding in time
To cross paths and traverse paths with bare feet
To feed on the same abóbora (pumpkin)
To be shaded by the same tree
To understand that our roots vibrate in our face when a subtle wind comes into contact with puddles of water left by the rain where we see ourselves reflected’.
Years later, Calel would cross through the immaculate Paulist modernity of Ibirapuera, and now he does so as well in old Europe; moreover, he does so in a museum with the name of a monarch. As part of the collection of the same museum, he walks with his brother through the old corridors of the former hospital for the mentally ill, now the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, to encounter himself, face to face, with Picasso. But more precisely with that painting, which serves as a symbol of the pain of war and genocidal massacres, and which in recent months has been given a new interpretation by being shown at the demonstrations against the Palestinian genocide in Madrid. To see Edgar and Julio protected by the skin of the jaguar observing this painting is to recontextualise the pain and the victims of the colonial wound, where they observe the deterioration of the West and the damage suffered between brothers, mirrored in the relationship of brotherhood between these men who cover themselves with skins. On the other hand, another layer of meaning is added, if we consider: How much violence is still being perpetrated in their lands today, without the possibility of large-scale murals or museum images, as Guatemala is a country experiencing perpetual violence within the country itself, against women, indigenous communities and many other collectives? Together, united looking at this painting, they represent resilience and resistance simultaneously. By being part of such an act of a rewriting of history. A history from one side of the ocean to the other, for as the artist says with certain irony and a good understanding of past events, from one history to another history, in between, there is the ocean, and I would add that all that this entails…
The Calel brothers went to Almodovar hill, emblem of the Vallecas School and the place where Alberto Sánchez's sculpture Monumento a los pájaros [Monument to the Birds] was to be crowned, to serve as a refuge and shelter for birds and vermin. There, in greater contact with nature, they took soil for their paintings and saw the landscape of the city of Madrid in the distance. In this action, depicted in the photograph, the brothers camouflage themselves more closely with the animals' surroundings, and reverse the sighting that led to think that Latin America was India, as they can now discern factories, buildings under construction and motorways in the distance. An image that reflects part of the industrial process and progress in Spain, and which in turn, makes us rethink what kind of relationship we have stipulated with nature, the proximity to the territory, and with the rural environment. Questioning the established paradigms from the field of art: What and who were left out of this avant-garde? What kind of progress was constructed, even within a progressive sphere, that left many on the margins of these views of nature, even in contexts beyond the seas?
If, as white Europeans observing the Calel brothers with the jaguar's skins, we were falling into a certain exoticisation or romanticisation of the gaze, the artist once again charges directly and textually against our hegemonic-colonial-eurocentric gaze. In his series El Blanco Trabaja [The White Man Works], 2025 he contrasts the connotations of the early 20th century that endow white as the colour of ‘pure joy and Infinite purity. Black is the robe of greatest, deepest sorrow and the symbol of death’ by Kandinsky; or those of the suprematism of Malevich’s 1918 White on White. He extends it to the history and sociology of that white man personified in the racial authority —that is us, Europeans— who believe themselves to be more than the communities they conquered, referring both to the colonial era, and to the racist looks and attitudes that are perpetuated, both in their local contexts in Latin America, and in a Spain that is increasingly conservative and refuses to accept its coloniality, racism and privilege. Calel humorously inverts the terms, and questions both the hegemonic geopolitical order of white supremacy —which both Nazis in the 20th century and now the ‘trumpists’ in the United States, or the neo-fascists of Meloni in Italy, Orbán in Hungary, or VOX in Spain, continue without shame in the 21st century— and the history and legacy of the European avant-gardes. In addition, as if that were not enough, he presents an installation composed of four paintings made with local soil. Placed taking into account the coordinates relative to the four cardinal points in space, we can read ri ri xpe ri mo's, 2025. If we translate this text from Kaqchiquel, we could translate it as ‘look, look, look. here comes the white man, or the one who is not from here - the ladino (the outsider) - the one who thinks he is going to teach us how to do things, or the one who thinks he is more than us’. A piece that not only deals with the colonial past, but also with the present and the paternalistic, charitable or superiority attitudes exerted towards indigenous communities. These paintings frame the space and question the way we look at the object of study that indigenous cultures have been, in our eagerness to understand and exploit all their knowledge.
Jogging memory, ethnography was one of those sciences that, with the help of positivist-scientism, had the function of objectifying the conquered cultures, influencing attitudes of distancing, racism and non-assimilation of the subjugated cultures, under the prism of racial, religious and educational superiority. Aware of this concern for anthropological, ethnographic and social sciences, as well as the economic, intimate and personal relationship of what is shown, Calel also presents for this exhibition Traje tradicional de un Quique en la actualidad [A present day traditional costume of a Quique], 2025. These clothes, which belong to the artist, are the trace of an experience. Bought in a shop in Guatemala —although the artist often buys them at second-hand markets— they have been worn over the course of the last few years, bearing experiences with them. However, sometimes these clothes that we wear have also a determined an ephemeral temporality, as many of our clothes disappear from our lives for various reasons in an arbitrary manner. Here, the handmade embroidery has sealed them, as a way of containing those experiences and fixing or capturing that instant. At the same time, the piece questions the global economic markets and the image of indigenous communities. Many cultures lost part of their traditional ways of dressing with coloniality, even if they have tried strongly preserve these legacies. On the other hand, indigenous communities are also an important part of contemporary history with regard to their ways, their adaptation to modes of life, which have unfortunately been globalised. In this sense, Calel offers us a mirror to our ways of looking at and understanding the world around us, between the second-hand garments that are often sent to countries in the Global South, the Western assimilation of dress, and questions of access and privilege.
In 1970 Joseph Beuys, father of European conceptual performance art, used performance to heal the wounds of Nazism after World War II. He decided to hung up his famous felt suit, in an action between the role of the artist and the shamanic-performative ritual, and enunciated that the true artist was able to channel the energy of things to give them new powers and meaning, just like a shaman. Calel hangs his clothes, as an artist's self-portrait too, but while he may be close to performative practices, where rituality is a healing exercise, he is not a shaman, nor does he pretend to be one. That higher entity is not that of the artist, in his context, but the actual people in his community who have those powers and can connect to something beyond. In his portrait of his hanging clothes, on the contrary, he inverts any aura of shamanic spirituality, to take us into a personal intimate account of journeys, experiences and shared stories. The clothes do not have that pristine halo, they do not resemble ecclesiastical robes, nor do they seek that sublime halo as a symbol of purity or neatness. Far from it; the clothes brings us closer to the work, to the contained sweat, to that relationship between the salt that we release through our body fluid, but in what way we release through the pores of our skin evil experiences, which are also part of our daily lifes, at certain moments.
In relation to that salt and sweat, which have been formal and conceptual materials that Calel has always been interested in. As liquids and minerals that come out of our skin through labor, both historically with sugar cane, which the slaves cultivated, and the sweat that their bodies have had to shed under the yoke of slavery. Or salt as a mineral that can be used to preserve food, or to heal, being used in many rituals, or in order to heal the wounds of our body. Taking into account all the legacy of salt and sweat, the artist presents his series Trabajo qa b’anun [Qa b'anun labour], 2025. This expression is drawn from what people in Comalapa say and can harbor three different layers of meaning, with the same common axis, the relationship with the indigenous community and work: “At what point our way of life became work for others”. But it can also be thought of as “We who have no work, have become the work of others”, and a third meaning: “We have become our own work”. With these different layers of meaning it is impossible not to think about the relationship with precarious labor, extractivist policies, the impositions of the global-financial market, etc. But it also reminds us about the lack of professional ethics, the lack of care policies and the non-restitution to the communities of much of the usurped knowledge.
Finally, if the exhibition is presented as harmonious, healing and full of beauty —through its different forms—, it is because Calel always tends to mask a battlefield, where poetry may also flourish and where there can be a space for dreaming —through those embroidered canvases where his dreams are captured in the form of drawings—, and where a healthy environment for respect, exchange and understanding may grow. And, although the content of some of his works may make some people uncomfortable, we should understand that what he is doing is planting a seed, that same grain of corn —full of knowledge and energy, that serves as a mirror set in front of ourselves. For if Calel's dreams open and grow in this exhibition, it is to provide food today in Madrid. In this battlefields, in this sick society that we belong to, unable to go out and break the cosmos, is where his work breaks with force, to glimpse with clarity our past, to heal it in the present, and to allow us another sustainable harvest of exchanges in the future.