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THE LAUGH IS ON
THEM: A
GUATEMALAN
ARTIST’S TAKE ON
BELONGING
LATINX ART · AUGUST 22, 2018

Photos by Andrés Asturias

By Tatiane Santa Rosa

Pencils and cities, maps and flags: familiar symbols of

how knowledge and history have been constructed
through time. Or, perhaps, no, not quite. Not at all.
Who has constructed them? Are they really familiar?
To whom? In Fernando Poyón’s Al Otro Lado del
Trazo these symbols are re-ordered, transformed.
The solo exhibition was recently at La Erre, an
innovative independent art and cultural space in
Guatemala City run by artists.

Born and based in Comalapa, Guatemala—a

predominantly Kaqchikel (Mayan origin) municipality
—Fernando Poyón has participated in editions of the
Bienal de Paiz, and his works have been featured in
art institutions from México Ecuador and Cuba to
art institutions from México, Ecuador, and Cuba to
Argentina, Costa Rica, and Spain. He has often
challenged the way indigenous peoples have been
circumscribed and undermined by the West.

For example, for the 2014 Bienal de Paiz, in

collaboration with artist Ángel Poyón, they created
the installation Colleción Poyón, in which they
entitled themselves collectors of Mayan culture. They

selected and exhibited a series of objects that

participate in a visual culture that has exoticized
Mayan peoples: from carnivalesque costumes to
advertising and dolls. By doing so, Fernando and
Ángel hijack the loaded actions of collecting,
selecting, cataloguing, and curating which are
continually used by colonial and white cultures: they
turn the ethnographic gaze towards the very
producers of the exoticization of indigenous peoples.

Fernando Poyón, Al otro lado del trazo, wood, vinyl, and pvc, 2018

In Al otro lado del trazo (On the Other Side of the

Stroke), Fernando Poyón often uses the appearance
of objects that look benign, familiar, only to reveal
their origin as colonial or imperialist tools of
domination. Some of his pieces look like object-
assemblages, requiring the viewer’s careful visual
attention. Others are larger installations that create a
l ti hi ith th i ’ b di f l
relationship with the viewers’ bodies: for example,
in Detector de las palabras silenciadas (Detector of
Silenced Words) (2018), a row of gigantic pencils—
around 2-3 meters tall—lean onto the wall. Although
looking like ordinary writing tools, they have two
erasers at each edge.

On the other hand, El peso del día (The Burden of

the Day) (2017) looks like a fragile miniature city

made of cement and installed inside a black wooden

box that beckons viewers to bend to take a peek
inside its mysterious, tomb-like interior. This play with
scale is not arbitrary; Poyón seems to juggle with the
very nature of these colonial apparatuses. What is a
pencil, if not a tool that has been used for writing
history? Since colonization, in these continents now
called “Americas,” “history” marks not only the
beginning of modernity, but also the launching of
systematized endeavors of erasing indigenous
histories, diverse traditions, and knowledges.

In Poyón’s hands, history/memory becomes a un-

writing tool. The pencil is blown up to large scale to
reveal it as a burden, a clumsy instrument of history,
as if the artist were saying that these two-sided
erasers could only be functional or beneficial to
some: Western and imperialist cultures. The
exaggerated size of the object can also refer to the
forced shift from transmitting histories via indigenous
oralities to the enforcement of Western literacy,
which through disciplines such as anthropology and
sociology helped obliterate or misread indigenous
memories and records.
Fernando Poyón, El peso del día, wood and cement, 2017

In El peso del día, a shoeshine box—an object used

on the streets of Latin America by those who are
modest—refers to the dream of immigration of the
poorest, who seek a better life in global cities, or risk
their lives crossing the US-Mexico border. Although
these desires for belonging are valid, they also
create divisions between those who can pursue a
“better life” and those who do not have that option.
And what does the option to immigrate to the US
entail?

With economic and social crises aggravated in

Central American countries—such as Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Honduras—for many individuals and
families escaping violence or seeking a “better life,”
the only option is to immigrate. With today’s
exacerbated condition of Latin American asylum-
seekers’ deportations and children being separated
from parents at the US border, Poyón’s object, El
peso del día, achieves another layer of meaning, an
urgency. In today’s context, it reads also as an
impossibility of movement, of being trapped,
confined. By miniaturizing a city, as if transforming it
into a sand castle, Poyón may be commenting on the
illusion brought by the dream of belonging to a
nation, manifested in the image of city life.

He reverses the Eurocentric rationale that has

regimented the modern city in the first place: a
transient sand castle is the flipside of the modern
city’s utopian permanency While modern cities were
city s utopian permanency. While modern cities were
built based on Western expectations of functionality,
their attested failures across the world have shown
that “the machine for living” can only operate
through exclusion.

Fernando Poyón, Partida, steel, aluminum, and ceramic, 2018

Poyón’s gesture also suggests that the only

permanent aspect of modernity is the failure of
insisting on adhering to nation-statehood or
conforming to Western development doctrines. The
artist also refers directly to the disasters brought by
the Western idea of development
in Partida (Departure) (2018). Here, small ceramic
animal figures are attached to the blades of a
chainsaw, another perverse tool that, across Latin
America, has had a very active role in the
devastation of nature and indigenous ways of living
through agribusiness and industry. Poyón’s work
combines the delicacy of the ceramic miniatures with
the violence of chains and engines.

When Poyón uses world maps it is to undo Western

iconographies. If maps are thought of as neutral
products of scientific knowledge, it was through
them that the colonial mindset sought to “organize”
and control territory. Poyón’s world maps are either
incomplete puzzles or collapsed, overlapped,
clusters of lands In En el Sitio (In Place) (2010) he
clusters of lands. In En el Sitio (In Place) (2010), he
prints an image of the world map onto a rock’s
surface: the result is that the lines of countries’
borders are blurred, defaced.

Fernando Poyón, En el Sitio, rock printed with laser, 2010

The artist exposes the fault lines of the Western idea

of borders and boundaries that are disciplined by
maps’ grids. Printed on the rock, the grid is no more:
it is pulverized, giving place to the textures and
immeasurability of the rock’s materiality. In Formas
para verse, formas para organizarse (Ways of
Seeing, Ways of Organizing) (2018), it is sand that
takes over a world map puzzle displayed on a table:
the map’s grid is again disturbed. Miniature dunes
invade the immensity that is the “world”––that
illusionary cartographic representation that has been
carefully constructed by the West/North.

Finally, Poyón also takes on the use of flags, not only

the Guatemalan flag, but those of several other
nation-states. Flags—sometimes torn or ragged,
other times neatly arranged as if in a United Nations
display—appear in his works ornamenting found
objects. In Espacio de inmigración (Immigration
Space) (2018), a modest life-sized, white-painted,
wooden baby crib becomes a base for large national
flags. The flags loom around the railing, as if a
haunting promise for the youth: belonging is
required, fitting into borders is demanded.

Fernando Poyón, Espacio de inmigración, wood, cloth, and sponge,

2018

In Usos alternativos de una bandera (Alternative

Uses for a Flag), flags adorn a birdcage. Made in
2015, the object became a statement of the
inhumane immigration policies that have existed in
imperialist countries for centuries. As much as these
objects become puns, they also highlight the often
tragic, melancholic modes of national (or
transnational) belonging. Who is allowed to fully
belong to these nations? Who is allowed to move
with ease across borders? Usually, it is the non-white
and indigenous populations––non-normative
groups––that are excluded from state recognition. It
is usually the Latin American populations that have
not been able to magically cross borders. For those
who cannot belong, or can’t freely move, national
flags become oppressive ornaments.

Poyón’s metaphors look like jokes, but they are re-

significations: the laugh is on them. The laughter is
about them, about Western and imperialist
ideologies, their modes of thinking, and the failed
epistemologies that have been spoon-fed to Latin
American countries. Poyón goes after these objects
that seem universal, creating assemblages and
installations that disassemble big, presumptuous,
US/Eurocentric ideas, such as the blind belief in a
preordained equality that democracy is not always
able to deliver, or the perverse faith in borders, walls,
and cages.

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