The Silence of the Volcano...
Vernissage: 27.08.2025
Exhibition duration: 27.08.2025 - 24.09.2025
Artists: Esvin Alarcón Lam (GT), Edizon Cumes (GT), Marilyn Boror Bor (GT), Edgar Calel (GT), Jeff Cán Xicay (GT), Rosa Chávez Tijax (GT), Regina José Galindo (GT), B’alam Waykan García (GT), Mena Guerrero (GT), Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer (GT)
“El silencio del volcán
es mi silencio y el de los míos.
A lo lejos se mira sereno, pero no.
Va lleno de fuerza y calor,
es el hocico de esta tierra que es la mía,
siempre al acecho.”
Ximena Santaolalla
What kinds of collective spaces allow us to approach histories of violence that refuse representation? Can an archive generate affective economies of shared grief—spaces where loss is held collectively without being flattened? El silencio del volcán brings together a group of artists who respond through their practices to an archive rooted in experiences of migration, exile, clandestinity, political resistance, forced disappearance, and genocide during Guatemala’s counterinsurgent war (1954–1996)—one of the longest in Latin America. Through collaborative dialogue, the exhibition explores the potential of archival activation as a space for mourning, memory, and political imagination in the face of unrepresentable loss.
For over a decade, I have been assembling an archive—an attempt to reconstruct and unravel the fragmented traces of my family’s experience of the war in Guatemala. Though personal in its origins, the archive has revealed itself as situated within a wider, entangled topography of collective history. What at first appeared intimate, even private, increasingly pointed to something deeply communal: a shared landscape shaped by the silencing of political dissent.
Rather than treating the archive as evidence or as a static container of facts, this exhibition rehearses engaging with it as a site for rethinking how we relate to histories of violence and political resistance—not through resolution or identification, but through what Tina Campt calls adjacency: an affective practice of placing one’s own story in relation to others’, not in spite of difference, but through it. As the methodology guiding this work, adjacency resists the totalizing gestures of empathy or solidarity. It acknowledges the impossibility of fully translating another’s experience, and instead asks us to stay with the discomfort of divergence, to reckon with our complicities, and to work toward forms of connection that do not erase asymmetry.
The participating artists engage with the archive, bringing it into friction and resonance with their own real, fictional, or imagined autobiographies. This exhibition articulates rehearsals of memory where shared and differentiated histories meet, overlap, and strain against each other. The works activate the archive as a site of fabulation, documentation, co-construction, and poetic negotiation. In doing so, they challenge the colonial-imperial logics embedded in traditional archives, expose the violences that hegemonic narratives continue to reproduce, and propose ways of resisting through the circulation of affect, storytelling, and relation. The silence of the volcano is latent; it is the symptom of something unresolved and haunted. Beneath the surface, memory persists, laying siege to history.
andrea ancira (Curator)