Symbiotically Aligned: Disease and Healing in Guadalupe Maravilla's Performances
Installation View: "Guadalupe Maravilla: Portals" at ICA Miami. June 27 – November 24, 2019. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
Disease is often understood as abnormality, as lesion, as disorder, as pain, and as death. These associations are pervasive yet culturally-specific, and unfortunately hegemonic. The COVID-19 pandemic has imbued Guadalupe Maravilla’s work with an increased sense of urgency, as the world grapples with the shocking reverberations of universal disease. In 2020, disease is indifferent to factors like wealth and status which often determine access to healing and wellness services. Guadalupe Maravilla’s practice––which spans performance, video, sculpture, and drawing––addresses two themes which seem divergent but are actually symbiotically and spiritually interlaced: disease and healing, ultimately offering strategies for liberation.
I first encounter Maravilla’s work in the 2017 exhibition Exquisite Corpse: Moving Image and Latin American and Asian Art, held at Mana Contemporary Miami and organized by Smack Mellon. The video on view, Xolo Yawning, features a human carrying a large sculptural ornamentation on their shoulders. Later, I learn that this sculptural form carries a specific function––it acts simultaneously as a headdress, shrine, and portal––and forms part of the artist’s process of healing and purification. The human figure––whose face remains mostly concealed in the video––seems to inhabit multiple worlds. At once foregrounded by a cotton candy ocean and pink sky, and in another scene surrounded by open-mouthed silver coyotes, the protagonist may exist somewhere between human and animal, and perhaps even somewhere between life and death. The video’s title refers to the hairless dog breed Xoloitzcuintle, historically revered by Aztec, Maya, and Toltec groups who believed the species to be sacred. Maravilla alludes to the dogs’ symbolic weight as healers and to their supernatural ability in leading those recently deceased through the underworld. Parallels can be drawn here, of course, between the uncertainty and fear of what comes after death, and the perilous, excruciating journey many immigrants from Central America endure––a juxtaposition Maravilla highlights in many of his works.
The following year, I was lucky enough to experience The OG of Undocumented Children, which occurred at the Whitney Museum, as part of the exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art, curated by Marcela Guerrero. In this performance, Maravilla conceptually mapped his journey from San Salvador, El Salvador to the U.S. as an undocumented eight year old child fleeing the Salvadoran Civil War––accompanied by a coyote. Born in 1976 in San Salvador, Maravilla uses his personal experience to infuse his artworks with geopolitical meaning. In 2016 the artist (formerly known as Irvin Morazán) changed his name in honor of his undocumented father, who uses the name “Maravilla” in his false identity. In this performance, it is clear that while Maravilla invokes his own background, he is also underscoring the profound psychological and physical realities of immigration more broadly.
In a dimly lit hall, guests are ushered into the space and arranged around the center of the room. A central figure, carrying a shrine-like headdress on their shoulders, walks slowly across the crowd, looming at over 10 feet tall. Girls in black quinceañera dresses form part of the caravan, along with figures wearing white hazmat suits and an immigrant vampire family that only sucks the blood of Americans. Performers in costume resembling coyote-android hybrids utilize sleek vacuum cleaners as tools for freshening the air. Appearing both protective and menacing, as if somehow inhabiting two characters simultaneously, the coyote-androids seem to allude to the artist’s own childhood experience of exile and migration (in 1984, the artist fled his war-torn country of El Salvador, along with the help of coyotes, or paid smugglers that transport people across borders).
Although there are many climactic moments in the performance, some stand out and emphasize healing and memory. I related immediately to the figures in the hazmat suits, who at one point, as if resembling laborers in unison, examine their own reflections in hand mirrors. The room is dark and so the reflection is darkness, but they look anyway, shining bright flashlights into the void. Their reflections are invisible, as the light is blinding and their faces are shielded by ski masks. They are anonymous. This scene is towards the end of the performance, when La Momia Songstress coos a chilling opera that slowly dissolves into a chaotic yet liberating dance party––audience included.
Although it is easy to identify with the existential horror of looking in the mirror and seeing nothing in return, another moment in the performance underscores the process of what comes after confrontation with trauma: healing. The central protagonist throughout the performance is undoubtedly Maravilla himself. He is the figure that carries the immense headdress on his shoulders, accentuated with animal horns, foliage, and a hooded tiger pelt. In one scene, Maravilla sits in a chair, and a coyote-android lies across his lap, with another crouched at his feet. In a beautifully-lit composition evoking the sacredness of the Pietà, both coyotes use electronic vaporizers to cloud the central figure in fragrant, billowing vapor, like a purifying gesture suspended in air. It is clear that the journey the audience is experiencing is one of complex emotional character, illustrative of fear, power, and spiritual restoration.
Walk on Water Performance, Queens Museum, 2019, Photo Courtesy Artist.
While The OG of Undocumented Children leans into the idea of healing, its central narrative is one of migration, trauma, and liberation. In this powerful performance, Maravilla seems to foreshadow how foundational his border crossing journey is in his artistic inquiry––and how that experience helped shape future confrontations with trauma. In 2019, Maravilla performs Walk on Water at the Queens Museum. For this performance, Maravilla and other performers activate the historic Panorama of the City of New York, originally built for the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens. Walking along the miniature-scale city's waterways, Maravilla’s coyote-android hybrids reappear, performing a choreographed ritual using their vacuum cleaners to traverse and purify New York City. For this performance, Maravilla orchestrates an immersive sound bath using gongs, encouraging the public to heal and meditate collectively. Looking around, I notice people sitting cross legged on the floor, closing their eyes, immersed in deafening sound. At some point, I notice the sound within myself––or rather, I notice the frequencies transcending the audio realm, and instead feel the physical vibrations on the floor beneath my feet, in the tips of my fingers, and behind my eyelids. This soothing, trembling feeling lingers for hours after I leave the museum.
One of the most salient take-aways from the Maravilla performances I have witnessed is that healing is never singular or isolated. Healing is collective. By revealing so many intimate truths from his own personal experience, Maravilla practices vulnerability and opens up the audience by encouraging sharing, compassion, and solidarity. In many of his performances and most especially in his tripa chuca drawings, Maravilla collaborates with other undocumented people, who are able to share memories, fears, and dreams.¹ The artist explains: “The beautiful thing about tripa chuca is that anyone can play. Lines cannot touch. That’s the only rule. It almost feels like a fingerprint between two people. So therefore, we start building this bond between the undocumented, and we start creating this very complex labyrinth that is similar to our crossings from different parts of Latin America.”² This sentiment forms part of the artist’s multidisciplinary proposals for collective healing. For those most marginalized, whose experiences and daily lived realities are systematically tinged by the oppressive forces of our current nation-state and its leadership, these strategies are essential.
Disease Thrower Performance, 2020, Photo Courtesy Artist.
Disease Throwers #4, Mixed media wearable sculpture/ shrine/ instrument, 2019, Photo Courtesy Artist.
Disease Thrower Performance (Pixelated Goat), Knockdown Center, 2020, Photo Courtesy Artist.
The third and final performance installment, Disease Thrower, was scheduled for March 14, 2020 at Knockdown Center and was postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Maravilla recently shared that the performance would also be about his past struggles with cancer, and how disease affects the body and psyche. Again, Maravilla draws from his personal experience, and his belief that his tumor emerged from accumulated stress and trauma, the result of years of systemic abuse towards immigrants. Following that logic, I believe Maravilla poses another question: what is the real disease that must be overthrown? Perhaps it is our highly-ordered, hyper-accelerated, late-stage-capitalist civilization, with its militarized borders and industrialized incarceration and detention system.
I look forward to one day experiencing the final chapter in Maravilla’s epic performance trilogy.
¹ Tripa chuca is a Salvadoran collaborative line-drawing game, where participants draw winding line forms that can never intersect.
² Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. (2019, August 7). Guadalupe Maravilla: Crossing Borders Through Art [video file]. Exhibition Guadalupe Maravilla: Portals curated by Gean Moreno. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jxXeIJGu3I.
Alex Santana is a contemporary art scholar, criticism writer, and curator with an interest in conceptual, political, participatory art and curatorial studies. Originally from Newark, NJ, she is a child of immigrants from Spain and the Dominican Republic, and is deeply committed to social equity and access, most especially in the arts. She has held research positions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington DC), the Newcomb Art Museum (New Orleans, LA), and Mana Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ). In 2018, she curated the exhibition Morir Soñando at Knockdown Center (Queens, NY), and since then has collaborated with artists and curators on other independent projects, including a DIY summer lecture series, Artists on Artists.