La casa es un viaje (The House Is a Journey) is built from the murmurs of the Pacific’s most intimate spaces, sheltered among light, shadow, and palm fronds. Moisés Barrios turns with sustained thematic commitment toward the palm, examining its materiality in both life and death to explore its enduring presence in the everyday landscape of Guatemala’s Pacific coast. The use of palm as a building material is a vernacular response to the intense sun, humidity, and ocean breeze of the tropics. The steep angles of its roofs insulate against heat, withstand torrential rains with ease, and can be repaired simply as they weather over time. While modern constructions of corrugated metal and concrete blocks amplify the sun’s heat and are gradually corroded by salt and sea mist, palm dwellings respond organically to the extreme conditions of the Pacific littoral.

Moisés portrays the elusive silences that dwell between the hum of rusted circuits and the rhythm of the sea’s ebb and flow. As with much of his recent work, these scenes emerge from the extensive photographic archive the artist has built since the 1970s across hundreds of kilometers of Guatemalan territory. This archive bears witness to a sustained practice of observing both the landscape and those who inhabit it. For more than four decades, these images have traveled in both directions: from photography to painting, and from painting to renewed interpretations of photography. Barrios’s work is grounded in the continual activation of the archive, where each new iteration of a scene—through shifts in composition, framing, color, or scale—also opens new possibilities for interpretation.

La casa es un viaje interweaves the artist’s visual memories with the historical memory of the landscape, much as palm fibers are woven together to shelter a home. Presented here as an aide-mémoire, the archive reveals a persistent search for compositions capable of rendering visible the historical impact of globalization and U.S. imperialism in the region. Moisés immortalizes banana leaves as though wielding a machete rather than a paintbrush, reminding us that the traces of repression and violence continue to permeate everyday life.

Inés Anleu Gil

Guatemala City, August 2026