Between 1981 and 1983, the Guatemalan army razed the crops of the Maya Ixil people as part of an extermination policy 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 food. Each time soldiers cut its leaves, they grew back, turning every attempt at eradication into a confirmation of the plant’s abundance.

David Pérez Karmadavis honors these stories through six large-scale paintings, a mural, and an installation of ceramic pieces. His work unfolds dense ecosystems where body and plant blur into one another, revealing that the human, the vegetal, and the transcendental are a single substance that protects us. While in Guatemala genocide trials have been annulled, judicial processes carefully dismantled, and official records erased from state archives, malanga preserves 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 earth flourishes.

Wingston González

Guatemala City, April 2026