One of the central works in “Les soñadores” (The Dreamers), Guadalupe Maravilla’s solo exhibition at REDCAT, is a massive serpent sculpture resembling a bony carcass stripped of flesh, a marker of violence and decomposition. Assembled from found objects, spiky maguey leaves (also known as agave), and a hardened mixture of glue that approximates cartilage––quite literally the work’s connective tissue––the creature appears on a long black wall adorned with line drawings (a collaboration with artists Jackie Amézquita and Michael Larios) and numbered birthday candles, a surprising inclusion that alludes to the chronicling of time, specifically that of childhood. The sculpture, titled Migratory Birds Riding the Celestial Serpent, 2021, in fact directly references a foundational event from Maravilla’s youth: When he was only eight years old, he fled the Salvadoran Civil War alone, traveling with other unaccompanied children and a “coyote” through Central America and Mexico to reach the United States, where he finally reunited with his family. The artist has frequently retraced the original route of this treacherous journey––even more perilous now due to the Trump administration’s brutal and xenophobic immigration crackdown––collecting objects discarded by other refugees along the way and embedding them into the sinewy body of the snake, which represents the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, a Mesoamerican deity. Here, by transforming these tangible remnants of trauma into a mythic beast capable of ferrying them away, Maravilla reimagines a tenet of indigenous cosmology as a source of personal and collective repair.
With its focus on the material traces of trauma, emigration, and displacement, Migratory Birds recalls Gabriel Orozco’s performative sculpture Yielding Stone, 1992, a Plasticine ball––a surrogate for the artist’s body––riddled with dents and debris from being rolled through the streets of New York City, its form irrevocably scarred by its odyssey. Whereas Maravilla’s Migratory Birds indexes objects shed by those fleeing trauma (bottles, toys, a tiny pair of children’s Crocs), Orozco’s Yielding Stone astutely allegorizes the bruising impact of trauma on the body itself. This correlation between distress and disease buttresses much of Maravilla’s recent work: As an adult, he was diagnosed with and survived colon cancer, a condition he believes directly stems from the colossal strain of fleeing war and living in the US undocumented (he is now a citizen). In response, “Les soñadores” includes nine other objects and two videos (plus a shrine and a sound piece) that together center forms of collective recuperation and healing, such as sound baths, cleansing rituals, and storytelling. These works essentially reframe the project of an institutional solo exhibition as a collaborative, reparative endeavor.
For example, five small, undated embroideries, all created by refugee women who similarly fled El Salvador in the 1980s, line the wall adjacent to Migratory Birds. Borrowed from the Museo de la Palabra y Imagen in San Salvador, the compositions depict personal memories of the atrocities committed by Salvadorean paramilitary forces during the war. Elsewhere, in the short video Detention Center Performance, 2022, a group of teenagers imprisoned at an immigration detention center in upstate New York recount their highly controlled daily schedule. In doing so, they casually reveal the intimate cruelties wrought by the increasingly draconian border policies of the US, which compound the experience of bloodshed by persecuting those who attempt to escape it. Ultimately, each of these examples serves to animate and amplify the individual voices of those swept up by larger tides of geopolitical violence, suggesting that the shared act of naming trauma can perhaps begin to alleviate its sting. Here, we can consider “Les soñadores” not as a presentation of objects but rather as a constellation of narratives, which, much like the accretions of glue in Migratory Birds, function as the exhibition’s binding tissue.
Even the exhibition’s most formal works––a series of six sculpted paintings carved from volcanic rock––derive from collaboration. Created in conjunction with a group of artists in Mexico, these small-scale pieces predominantly take the shape of a hand grasping a flat medallion adorned with various words and symbols (a serpent, a frog, a mythic figure clutching a lightning bolt) that together recall retablos, devotional paintings designed to offer protection. In Indigenous Mesoamerican cosmology, volcanoes are regarded as sacred entities (and are particularly abundant in El Salvador); the material choice of volcanic rock reasserts the works’ curative potential. Nearby, a large-scale medicinal shrine composed of objects and retablos from Maravilla’s personal collection further emphasizes this notion of talismanic protection, revealing the various ways in which we imbue objects with meaning. Here, the artist ultimately points to the narrative potential of objects and the healing protentional of narratives: Each offers a discrete creative pathway for eulogizing and uplifting those caught in the crosshairs of trauma and exodus.