Marilyn Boror Bor – Caja Lúdica – María Fernanda Carlos – Centro Q’anil – Rosa Chávez – Colectivo Tz’aqol – GuateMaya – Kiara Aileen Machado – Celeste Mayorga – Movimiento Nacional de Tejedoras Mayas de Guatemala – Museo del agua – Proyecto Parutz’ – Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer – Selva y cerro – Sonido Quilete – Marta Tuyuc Us – Sergio Valencia Salazar

Opening: Saturday, November 23 from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.

La Nueva Fábrica (LNF) is pleased to announce Para curarnos el susto (To Heal Our Fright), a collective exhibition curated by Marilyn Boror Bor and Chantal Figueroa in collaboration with Ilaria Conti and with a curatorial committee that includes Jimena Pons and Karen Ramos.

As part of LNF’s 2024-2025 exhibition cycle, Para curarnos el susto explores themes of healing and resistance through a set of foundational questions: How has Guatemala resisted invasion, dispossession, racism, and genocide? What does healing look like in response to colonial forces, and who holds this knowledge?

The exhibition is a communal creation shaped by a curatorial team of Guatemalan women healers and artists. Collectives from various disciplines—such as theater, performance, gastronomy, textile arts, land defense, spiritual practices, and academic research—have been invited to dialogue with artists on the processes of healing and resistance.

The participating artists and collectives include Marilyn Boror Bor in collaboration with Movimiento Nacional de Tejedoras Mayas de Guatemala, María Fernanda Carlos with Caja Lúdica, Rosa Chávez with Selva y Cerro and Sonido Quilete, Kiara Aileen Machado with GuateMaya, Celeste Mayorga with Centro Q’anil, Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer with Museo del agua, Marta Tuyuc Us with Colectivo Tz’aqol, and Sergio Valencia Salazar with Proyecto Parutz’.

Through these artistic exchanges, the exhibition unfolds as a multidisciplinary archive of societal, epistemic, communal, and individual healing practices rooted in the region. In addition to this rich archive, the exhibition features a central space with extensive documentation and a program of public events, allowing deeper engagement with the themes explored.

The project honors how communities across Guatemala have navigated personal and communal healing and affirmed life despite 500 years of systemic violence. The exhibition celebrates the practices developed by collectives, women, spiritual guides, researchers, and artists of diverse identities, all of whom draw upon ancestral knowledge to sustain Guatemala’s body-territory.

Through visual art, performance, installations, ceremonies, and community dialogue, Para curarnos el susto examines the nature of healing in the face of coloniality, questions who holds the power to heal, and centers the work of collectives that use ancestral knowledge to heal in the context of a history marked by denial, gender and racial violence, and epistemic oppression.

This project emerges from the need to cultivate collective dialogue around Guatemala’s 500 years of colonial history, creating a space to reflect on the endurance of its legacies.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a poem written by Rosa Chávez in which the poet and artist articulates pathways to healing in the face of colonial fright:

and we sing, and we reclaim our voice, reclaim our truth, 

reclaim our language, reclaim our body, 

reclaim our time, reclaim our blood, 

reclaim our breath, reclaim our freedom, 

to heal ourselves from the fright

we breathe deeply, and the dignity of the water running through our bodies lets us flow

and our spirit returns, we flutter with the rhythm of life 

I return to the earth

I step back into the world

Kintzalij b’i pa ri ulew 

kinel chi lo jun mul chi uwach ulew

An ongoing series of public programs will unfold throughout the exhibition to expand on the notions and concerns at the heart of the project and reinforce its communal and participatory nature.

For press release, please click HERE.

About La Nueva Fábrica’s 2024-2025 exhibition cycle

2024 marks five-hundred years since the arrival of the Spaniards to the area we now call Guatemala. To address such historical occurrence and the centuries of coloniality that have shaped and continue to shape Guatemalan society in multiple and transversal ways, La Nueva Fábrica (LNF) presents a focused year-long exhibition and programming cycle (June 2024 – May 2025). 

During this time, we seek to move beyond the mere discourse on coloniality and the presentation of exhibitions that address colonial issues just as content. This choice stems from the awareness that colonial dynamics still haunt Guatemalan life.  Rather than “illustrating” through exhibitions what our publics already know and experience in their daily lives, we strive to move beyond the simple acknowledgment of coloniality and imagine forms of re-existence that offer opportunities for communal encounters and the healing ofcolonial wounds.

In light of this, La Nueva Fábrica’s 2024-2025 exhibition program focuses on projects that foster notions and practices of healing. These exhibitions serve as offerings and shared spaces in which to take care of ourselves and others, reflect on what affects us as individuals and as societies, and experiment communally with diverse forms of healing—be they spiritual, corporeal, affective, epistemic, and more.

Each exhibition is commissioned and conceived as a context in which senses beyond sight and diverse forms of sense-making are involved. The practices and concerns at the heart of each project are further cultivated through a series of public programs presented throughout each exhibition.

Image: Archivo Colecto Tz’aqol. Photo by Ali Campbell.