Xar - Sueño de obsidiana

2020 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
13:06 minutes

The point of departure for Xar – Sueño de obsidiana by Edgar Calel is a poem that the artist wrote in Maya Kaqchikel. Made in collaboration with Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Pereira dos Santos, the film was shot while in lockdown in Brazil, where Calel found himself during the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The film shows Calel ambling around the empty Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer to host the São Paulo Biennial in 1954. This iconic modernist building is located in the Ibirapuera park next to the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art; the artistic center of one of the biggest metropolises in the world today. In the work, Calel imagines the site before the ideological apparatuses—that of a nation-state, of modern and contemporary art, and their institutions—were instated. That is to say, Calel’s work attempts to visualize the site as used by the Indigenous people who populated it before. For that purpose, he resorts to transmutation and the possibility of seeing the building through the eyes of a jaguar, pointing at the importance of the personhood granted to nonhuman entities in many Indigenous cosmologies. In the film, Calel appears with a sweatshirt he has worn in other works with the names of the 22 Mayan languages embroidered in it. His voice recites a fragment of the poem Sueño de obsidiana in Kaqchikel, which is in turn informed by dreams he had during his stay in Brazil and the bodily experience of transit during challenging times. Making any attempt at translation is a mere approximation. At the same time, this work is a way for Calel to communicate through time and space with his ancestors. A huge painting with the word “kit” is hung from one of the pavilion’s balconies. The word was used by his late grandmother to communicate with different birds who lived around her house; it is now used by Calel to communicate with her.

Edgar Calel is a Maya Kaqchikel artist and poet from the midwestern highlands of Guatemala. His work delves into the cosmology of his people and how it uncomfortably interacts with Western epistemologies and systems of value. His practice often interrogates the relationships between indigeneity and its representation in the modern world, negotiating the untranslatability of specific ways of being in the world and the words that name them. Inevitably, this leads to a position of resistance to specific forms of symbolic and physical violence and discrimination Indigenous people endure in Latin America. Calel describes his practice not as art—a nonexistent word in Maya languages—in the Western sense, but as Naoj: a conflation of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. His work manifests as a communal form for production that involves his whole family and is connected to the activities that produce and maintain life in Chi Xot.

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