Between 1981 and 1983, the Guatemalan army razed the crops of the Maya Ixil people as part of a policy of extermination fueled by the Cold War and the interests of neocolonial powers. Families who fled to the mountains found in malanga—a wild tuber that grows along riverbanks—their primary source of sustenance. Each time soldiers cut its leaves, they grew back, turning every attempt at eradication into a testament to the plant’s abundance.

David Pérez Karmadavis brings these histories together through six large-scale paintings, a mural, and an installation of ceramic works. His practice unfolds dense ecosystems in which body and plant blur into one another, revealing that the human, the vegetal, and the transcendental are a single, protective substance. While in Guatemala genocide trials have been annulled, judicial processes deliberately dismantled, and official records erased from state archives, malanga holds a memory that exists before and beyond any tribunal. It embodies a root that survived alongside the communities it nourished—and to which it gave new life.

The plant insists. The root persists. And in that stubborn continuity, the material and spiritual abundance of the land flourishes.

Wingston González

Guatemala City, April 2026