Regina José Galindo risks her body for her performance art

In 2013, Regina José Galindo attended the trial of José Efraín Ríos Montt and Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, who led the 1982 coup in Guatemala and subsequently ruled the country until 1983. Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez spoke about how the army dug mass graves, then murdered members of the indigenous Ixil Maya and threw their bodies into the pits. Both were ultimately acquitted.

Galindo, like many Guatemalans, was deeply disturbed by her statements – and in response he staged a performance. For a 2013 work known as Earthshe stood naked in the middle of a field while a bulldozer tore up the ground around her, creating a small island of dirt. She stood still for about half an hour, her body as vulnerable as the surrounding land and the bodies of the Ixil Mayas once buried in similar places.

For Galindo, the piece was a form of resistance. During the performance, which can now be seen in a video documentary, she does not falter, even as the tractor moves its arm close above and around her. Galindo has done meditation exercises in which she imagines roots growing out of her feet. Here she clings to what little she has left.

More than a decade later Earth was recently presented at MoMA PS1 in New York earlier this year, amid widespread speculation about another genocide, this time in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 40,000 people since the October 7 Hamas attack. In an interview with ARTnewsGalindo described the work as “a work that questions one genocide in order to question all the others.”

In addition, she said, she wanted to show “a work of art in which a woman shows her naked vulnerability by defending a piece of land, while every day we see men and women defending their land. It brings this dynamic where there can be interactions of solidarity between Guatemalans, the New York audience and the people of Palestine. And also the recognition of erased histories, of people forgotten by empires and their history.”

Galindo’s art of the last two decades is characterized by its explicit political and critical content, often using her body as a tool of confrontation and social change.. In 1999, for example, she performed I will reach into the wind (I’ll Scream It into the Wind), in which she hanged herself from a bridge while reciting her poems about the abuse suffered by women in Guatemala. In 2004, she underwent surgery to reconstruct her hymen for her work. HimenoplastyAnd in 2005, she carved the word “PERRA” (slut) into her right leg with a knife to express her condemnation of the crimes committed against women in her country.

Although Galindo began as a poet and illustrator, she turned to performance art after receiving an invitation from her friend and colleague Jessica Lagunas to participate in the group exhibition Proyecto de Arte Independiente (Independent Art Project) in 1999. Galindo began collecting newspaper articles about gender abuse, rape, and hate crimes against women in Guatemala between 1998 and 1999, and Lagunas introduced her to the performance art of Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramović, and Chris Burden, all of whom also used their bodies to comment on power.

Galindo planned to write poems based on her studies. With this new knowledge and all the lust and anger she had left, she finally put on a performance: The pain on one arm (The pain on a handkerchief), For this, she was tied to a vertical bed while images of the newspaper articles were projected onto her naked body. With her performance, the artist expressed her criticism of the systematic, recurring violence against women that continues to this day.

While Galindo is best known for difficult, painful performances, such as I will look into the wind, the one where she hanged herself from a bridge, other works of hers are gentler in comparison. With each repetition of her work Appearance (Apparition), Galindo blurs the boundaries between performance and sculpture with her “non-permanent statue.” She presents a human body with barely recognizable features while it stands still. The performer functions as a monument to a violence or injustice that corresponds to the space in which she inserts herself, interrupting the existing narratives.

Your latest version of Appearance was carried out in 2022 and included 43 women wrapped in large cloths. These women appeared in public spaces to commemorate the 43 femicides that had taken place in Spain the year before. The piece places its performers in a position of resistance and resilience in the face of the forces that want to devour them. This concept of the non-permanent statue also characterizes Galindo’s work, previously seen at PS1, Earth.

Over the course of her career, Galindo has expanded her focus beyond Guatemala, where she still lives today, to other communities abroad. Galindo has just opened a retrospective solo exhibition entitled “Descolonicemos el mundo” (Let’s decolonize the world) at La Panera Art Center in the Catalan city of Lleida. Among the artworks spanning the last twenty years of her production, Galindo presented Fruit Amarga (Bitter Fruit), which was commissioned specifically for this exhibition. The project highlights the thousands of seasonal workers who come from abroad (mostly Africa) to harvest the region’s fruit; workers who often have no place to rest due to systemic racism, unfair treatment and low wages.

To prepare, she conducted historical research and made contacts with local initiatives such as VIGEO- Visualidad and Geoestética en la Era de la Crisis Ecosocial (Visuality and Geoaesthetics in the Era of Ecosocial Crisis), a project of the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Barcelona, ​​and Fruita amb Justícia Social (Fruit with Social Justice), an organization that defends and fights for the human rights of fruit harvest workers in Lleida, to give these struggles a greater voice and create new connections for collective efforts. In Fruit AmargaSleeping on a bed of fruit collected by day laborers in a public square in Lleida, Galindo addresses the vulnerability, lack of security and prejudice faced by migrant workers.

But no matter what subject Galindo tackles, she focuses on human vulnerability. This means that her work is “always about colonization in all its forms,” ​​she says – even if she doesn’t address it explicitly.

But Galindo’s art also has a warmth that isn’t always obvious. Reading about Galindo’s work, I couldn’t help but think of a quote from Audre Lorde that I currently have as my phone’s wallpaper: “I want to live the rest of my life, long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much of the work I have left to do as I can. I will write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my nostrils… everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I will be like a Fuck Meteor!”

Galindo’s performances and her dedication to her craft exude this intense desire to challenge colonial and patriarchal narratives of those in power. “We all have to invent our own creative language,” she told me, “because everything is done and said by those in power. Then we contextualize and adapt the ideas to our own criteria and circumstances. From this, new ideas or new projects and outcomes emerge.”