What kinds of collective spaces allow us to approach histories of violence that refuse representation? Can an archive generate affective economies of shared grief? The Silence of the Volcano brings together a group of artists that through their practice respond 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.
The exhibition is both a slow, ritual-like gathering, meant to give respect and concern to the earth and all it bears, and a silent remembrance and awareness laboratory, where alchemical-like actions are penetrating the pulsating past through memory and tradition into the present concern of future forgetfulness.
Due to numerous cancellations and censorship, one becomes an expert on how to archive and tell a story, reclaiming one’s right to speak while protecting oneself from potential legal accusations because of the text itself. It is an art we, the cancelled, are forced to master.
