Para curarnos el susto (To Heal Our Fright)

Marilyn Boror Bor with Movimiento Nacional de Tejedoras Mayas de Guatemala, María Fernanda Carlos with Caja Lúdica, Rosa Chávez with Selva y Cerro and Sonido Quilete, Kiara Aileen Machado with GuateMaya, Celeste Mayorga with Q’anil, Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer with Museo del Agua, Marta Tuyuc Us with Colectivo Tz’aqol, Sergio Valencia Salazar with Proyecto Parutz’.

La Nueva Fábrica (LNF) is pleased to announce Para curarnos el susto (To Heal Our Fright), a collective exhibition curated by Marilyn Boror Bor and Chantal Figueroa in collaboration with Ilaria Conti and with a curatorial committee that includes Jimena Pons and Karen Ramos.

The project explores themes of healing and resistance through a set of foundational questions: How has Guatemala resisted invasion, dispossession, racism, and genocide? What does healing look like in response to colonial forces, and who holds this knowledge?

The exhibition is a communal creation shaped by a curatorial team of Guatemalan women healers and artists. Collectives from various disciplines—such as theater, performance, textile arts, food sovereignty, land defense, spiritual practices, and academic research—have been invited to dialogue with artists on the processes of healing and resistance. Through these exchanges, the exhibition unfolds as a multidisciplinary archive of societal, epistemic, communal, and individual practices. In addition to this rich archive, the exhibition features a central space with extensive documentation and a program of public events, allowing deeper engagement with the themes explored.

The exhibition’s title is inspired by a poem written by Rosa Chávez in which the poet and artist articulates pathways to healing in the face of colonial fright:

and we sing, and we reclaim our voice, reclaim our truth,
reclaim our language, reclaim our body,
reclaim our time, reclaim our blood,
reclaim our breath, reclaim our freedom,
to heal ourselves from the fright
we breathe deeply, and the dignity of the water running through our bodies lets us flow
and our spirit returns, we flutter with the rhythm of life
I return to the earth
I step back into the world
Kintzalij b’i pa ri ulew
kinel chi lo jun mul chi uwach ulew

Para curarnos el susto examines the nature of healing in the face of colonization, questions who holds the power to heal, and centers the work of collectives in the context of a history marked by denial, gender and racial violence, and epistemic oppression. The project honors how communities across Guatemala have affirmed life despite 500 years of systemic violence. It celebrates the practices developed by collectives, women, spiritual guides, researchers, and artists of diverse identities, all of whom draw upon ancestral knowledge to sustain Guatemala’s body-territory.

La Nueva Fábrica’s 2024–25 exhibition cycle
2024 marks five hundred years since the arrival of colonizers to the area we now call Guatemala. To address such historical occurrence and the centuries of coloniality that have been shaping Guatemalan society in multiple and transversal ways, LNF presents a focused year-long exhibition and programming cycle (June 2024–May 2025).

During this time, we seek to move beyond the mere discourse on coloniality and the presentation of exhibitions that address colonial issues just as content. This choice stems from the awareness that colonial dynamics still haunt Guatemalan life. Rather than “illustrating” through exhibitions what our publics already know and experience daily, we strive to move beyond the simple acknowledgment of coloniality and imagine forms of re-existence that offer opportunities for communal encounters and the healing of colonial wounds.

In light of this, our 2024–25 exhibition program focuses on projects that foster notions and practices of healing. These exhibitions serve as offerings and shared spaces in which to take care of ourselves and others, reflect on what affects us as individuals and as societies, and experiment communally with diverse forms of healing—be they spiritual, corporeal, affective, or epistemic.