The Kaqchikel people are one of the largest Mayan groups of Guatemala. In Calel’s case, as a Kaqchikel artist, it is indigenous and Mayan. The plot of soil is contained-protected-within this chant.Īs a result, the work’s devotional and ancestral qualities permeate what the installation symbolizes: a genealogy. It’s a nourishment, an aura and a companion that is weaved into the layers of the soil just like it is nested in Calel’s memory. By placing the words in B’alab’äj, he tells us that corn signifies the centrality of agriculture and land-caring. Language and exchange take place anytime and everywhere. The chant inhabits an essential connection between the land and human-animal relations. He previously incorporated the same onomatopoeic call-kit kit kit-in his first solo show, Pa tu run ché ( From the treetop, 2021), as well as in other works, which suggests an attachment, a lasting echo. This isn’t Calel’s first time doing just that. In incorporating this chant, Calel, born and based in Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa), Guatemala, melds poetry and musicality with a living, organic landscape. This localization is significant to the artist and the meaning of the work since B’alab’äj or Jaguar Stone refers to a stone located in a corn-abundant valley in Calel’s hometown in Guatemala’s central highlands. The shapes of the furrows draw the outline of a word, a call that Calel’s grandmother would repeat to feed the birds with maize. The installation is part ritual, material and anthro-ecological. For instance, in the transposed earth that is slightly elevated above ground level and the invisible but present sky, which the birds evoke.Ĭandles are lit and replaced daily, keeping with a spirit of gratitude. Air and warmth connect the installation with various embodied, representational and abstract dimensions-human and nonhuman. Tools are also part of the installation proper and some are kept in an adjoining room, as an annexed antechamber more than a storage place. There’s also a mix of consuming objects (candles), living substance (soil) and natural masses (rocks). Some of them have left burn marks against the rock-a tarnish that reveals a presence, the passage of time in the tension between ephemerality and endurance. The flickering flames of real candles warm against a stone.
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