Guadalupe Maravilla as Artist and Healer


In his Brooklyn studio, El Salvador-born artist Guadalupe Maravilla prepared to activate the latest “Disease Shooter #0”. acclaimed sculpture series those who use the powers of vibrational sound as a form of healing.

Recovering from a rare cancer, the author took his place on a high woven straw platform, his socked feet turned to a formidable metal gong. He relaxed into the ritual space of the artist – part sculpture, part temple. He was covered in a mysterious material blackened with ash from the healing rites that Maravilla, himself a cancer survivor, performed for hundreds of warriors in Queens last summer.

The voices, which started with low monk-like tones, gradually rose before turning into powerful throaty roars that he could feel enter his body from behind his cheekbones. “We want to ‘thank you’ to the struggling body parts,” the artist told me as I lay motionless on the lectern. “Thank them for their recovery and perseverance in difficult times.”

If the difficulty is a teacher, Maravilla has learned from the master. She fled violence when she was only 8 years old. civil war in El Salvador alone and embarked on a punishing 2½-month 3,000-mile journey to the US-Mexico border, transitioning from coyote to coyote before eventually crossing the border as an undocumented immigrant. Twenty-eight years later, while a graduate student at Hunter College, Maravilla was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. To relieve pain left over from radiation and other procedures, some have turned to Indigenous healing practices inherited from their Maya ancestors. Chief among these were “sound baths,” which use sonic vibrations from gongs, shellfish, tuning forks, and other instruments to restore calmness and balance and remove toxins from the body.

“Disease Shooter #0” (2022) is one of 10 works. “Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven,” Solo exhibition opening April 8 (until September 18) at the Brooklyn Museum. The title refers to a fifth-century volcanic eruption that uprooted the Maya – an acronym for three generations of displacement, including the artist himself. Cultural appropriation of artifacts is represented, the earliest, by whistles, conch shells, and other Mayan objects the museum has chosen for display from its permanent collection. In the most recent example, they captured undocumented Central American youth detained above New York state in a video where they collectively reenact details of everyday life incarcerated with the artist.

artist’s pieces it can also be seen at the Museum of Modern Art “Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y Fuerza” until 30 October – the Spanish title translates as “hope and strength”. Healing sound baths are offered for visitors until June.. An exhibition calledSound Botany” recently opened in Norway at the Henie Onstad Art Center.

The concept of healing and rebirth permeates Maravilla’s work and the seemingly bizarre array of items in his studio – a plastic mosquito, several toy snakes, a large metal fly, an anatomical model of the human lung, a group of dry breads (the artist paints them). ) and a shelf full of bottled Florida water used for blessings, to name a few. A dried-up manta ray hangs heroically above the entrance—a nod to the sea creature that splashed through the waves to show its family its location, preventing it from drowning.

Objects embedded in works like “Sickness Shooter #0”—for example, loofah sponges and a woven hammock offering ancestral respite—are pages of a complex narrative in which past traumas, when properly treated, can lead to spiritual and creative renewal.

Maravilla’s otherworldly aesthetic, which also fuels a series of Latin American devotional paintings known as retablos, is inspired by Native Mayan culture, particularly Honduran rock obelisks and vegetation-filled pyramid ruins that were Salvadoran playgrounds as a child. “It was layered,” he remembered those ancient forms. “The whole world was there.”

While often autobiographical, the artist’s stalactite-like sculptures and other works speak to global themes such as disease, war, migration and loss. For example, a major mural piece at MoMA, “Migratory birds riding behind a celestial snake” (2021), incorporates a pram wheel and Crocs into a curvy wing strip and dry maguey leaves, references to children crossing the border. .

“Between the epidemic and the war in Ukraine, everyone feels psychologically battered, vulnerable and fearful,” said Eugenie Tsai, senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, of which the exhibition is a part. Mind Landscapes, an international cultural mental health initiative. “Guadalupe’s practice speaks volumes.”

The cancer diagnosis, which emerged on her 36th birthday, catalyzed a change in her approach and prompted her to retrace the migration route she had traveled as a frightened child. He now makes these pilgrimages regularly and collects objects that “have the right energy” for his sculptures along the way.

His real name is Irvin Morazan. In 1980, his father fled El Salvador after seeing the decapitated body of his brother, the artist’s uncle, hanging from a tree and identifying him in a borrowed shirt. Two years later, young Irvin’s mother followed, leaving him with relatives.

A few years later, Irvin began his own perilous journey north. Carrying a small notebook in his hand and often playing “tripa chuca” (“dirty guts”) on the way, the Salvadoran children’s two-player line drawing game is likened to a “fingerprint between two people.” It has since become a signature element in his exhibitions.

After caring for dozens of younger children in a hotel room in Tijuana for two weeks, she was woken at 3am by a coyote who smelled of alcohol. The man placed it in the back of a pickup truck and along with a fluffy white dog stretched out on top to hide it from border agents – like a white cadejo, a folkloric character that protects travelers from harm. (Irvin gained his citizenship in 2006.)

Her birthday, December 12, coincides with the auspicious day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who celebrates the mother of Jesus. Her own mother, who died of cancer in 2007, announced she wanted to name her baby Guadalupe during her illness, but her husband vetoed it in favor of a more masculine name. In 2016, to commemorate her second chance at life after cancer, the artist changed her name to Maravilla, which means “wonderful” or “curiosity” in Spanish, to honor the fake ID purchased by her undocumented father.

Maravilla attributes cancers and other illnesses in her family to the stress of generations of war, immigration, family separation and being undocumented. In 1987, her mother was deported to El Salvador for two years after an immigrant raid on her New Jersey factory where she worked. The artist said that it greatly harmed his health.

Still, she sees her own cancer as a blessing and transforms her practice from more performative work to creating spiritually powerful sculptures designed to heal. “I’ve always invested in learning ancient healing methods,” said Maravilla. “But before the illness, I didn’t know how to do that.” Retablos – a collaboration Daniel Vilchisfourth-generation Mexico City retablo painter – tributes to the radiation machine that killed his tumor, the gourds that fed it, the herbal remedies that helped him identify a problem with the help of a shaman. in his gut.

The name “Disease Thrower” is meant to evoke the ferocity and power of an Indigenous god (although technically it’s made from glue and fibers cooked in a microwave oven). Some of these throne-like statues reference cancer with plastic anatomical models of breasts, colons, and other body parts. Some are buried with zodiac crabs.

Maravilla focused its therapeutic sound baths largely on cancer survivors and the undocumented community where many workers lost their jobs during the epidemic. “I have 35 years of experience ahead of them,” he said of crossing the border. “I know what can happen when trauma goes untreated.”

He is upset that curation has become a commodity and is committed to making his apps available for free.

Inside “Planeta Abuelx” in the Socrates Sculpture Park Last summer, it created an open-air sound-bath environment anchored by two Gaudí-scale metal sculptures crowned by a gigantic gong. The installation was surrounded by a healing garden that the artist had planted: He also hired a firefighter to make sure that “whatever the people put out” was consumed by the flames, which involved more than 1,500 people over the course of four months. review for New York Timescritic Martha Schwendener wrote that “the project has been one of the best Socrates has to offer in recent years.”

The artist’s goal is to create a permanent healing center in Brooklyn comprised of artists, sound therapists, and other practitioners. “I’m not going to heal anyone with a magic wand,” she said of her approach. “I believe we are our own medicine.”

On Saturdays at the height of the epidemic, he held sound baths for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers at The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge, where pastor Juan Carlos Ruiz was undocumented for his first eight years. United States of America. At first, the rituals took place on the hard stone floors of the sanctuary.

But when the event moved to the next-door Brotherhood Hall, which had wood-timber floors, the vibrations deepened and the floors became “one giant wooden bed,” the priest said. Some members of the community had not slept well for months. “You could hear a chorus of snoring at the end of the session,” he said.

Aristotle Joseph Sanchez, father of three, spent 19 months in a Georgia detention center; it’s the ordeal that inspired the three Maravilla retables.

Sanchez was plagued by various physical ailments, including diabetes, and was at first somewhat surprised by the existence of “a bohemian.” But as Maravilla shared her story and explained her purpose, Sanchez said she knew good things would happen.

It was more painless. “Intention and intensity,” he said. “As long as you believe, you’ll get better.”



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