Timeline of Guatemalan Arts and Socio-Political History (1955-2015)

2015

Guatemala Después is a collaborative project developed by The New School and the Guatemalan arts organization Ciudad de la Imaginación. The initiative explores the ways in which social and political realities in contemporary Guatemala have affected–and keep affecting–its artistic and cultural production.

In order to provide a general framework for the artworks that were being showcased, we developed a multi-layered timeline showing the interactions between sociopolitical events and artistic interventions in Guatemala over the last 60 years.  I was the coordinator and designer of this project.

When exhibited in NYC, the visualization gave the visitors a basic context to approach the artworks and to understand the relevance of the exhibition in both a national and a global scale. But in Guatemala, the timeline served as a discussion-starter, inviting people to reflect on the information they were reading and to participate in the conversation by either inserting bites of their personal stories, suggesting additions or revisions to the already existing layers, or imagining the future of their country. Ranging from the trivial to heartfelt, the participatory installations in Xela and Guatemala City gathered the most diverse contributions, evidencing the blurred boundaries between the notions of history, collective memory, and personal memories as well as problematizing around them.