Regina Jose Galindo
In the 2013 video Tierra, Guatemalan artist and poet Regina José Galindo stands naked in a field, while over half an hour, a large earthmoving excavator razes the land around her. There is a stark visual contrast between the machine’s huge, armoured bulk, and the artist’s stark, vulnerable body. Eventually, Galindo is left on an island of grass surrounded by a large trench.
Galindo’s gesture acts as a reminder that the gaze of colonialism forms and enforces categories like ‘land’ and ‘gender’ to identify them as expendable and abusable resources. She describes how, in Tierra, ‘around me there is nothing but chaos and theft, but I remain on my feet, ready to fight, ready to defend the land that roots me.’ At the time of Galindo’s performance, the former president of Guatemala, General Efraín Ríos Montt, was standing trial for crimes against humanity that included genocidal sexual violence against Maya Ixil people.
Critic Michelle Santiago Cortés writes that Tierra ‘asks us to consider how our bodies are marked by gender, race, and class; and how, in our own lives, we play the role of the excavator or the person behind the camera, or we stand in the artist’s own two feet... Body and land are what situate us, Galindo reminds us. Without them, we are nobody and nowhere.’
University Gallery
The Quadrangle, University of Galway
Galway H91 FN8X
Access
Not wheelchair accessible
Accessible toilets (Quadrangle Building)
Seating provided
Accessible parking (Quadrangle Building)
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts
The Salvage Agency
Curated by Michele Horrigan
1 - 17 November 2024
Galway, Ireland
Video documentation: Jonathan Sammon
Photo: Installation still from Tierra, 2023, colour video with sound, 33 min 30 sec. Photo: Ros Kavanagh