A Land for the Few. Theatre and Farce

Pequod Co. in collaboration with curator Lorena Peña Brito and Proyecto Y, is pleased to present Tierra de pocos. Teatralidades y farsas [A Land for the Few. Theatre and Farce], an exhibition that proposes an urgent look at the tensions between body, landscape and power in the art scene of Mérida, Yucatán.

Several references in studies on Mesoamerican culture point out that theater was a practice among pre-Columbian natives. George Raynaud, a specialist in Mayan religion, has referred to it as more than just dances and rituals, but rather as “complete dramas with music, dance, and dialogue,” which were no longer encrypted from a theater of representation, but developed from the suggestion or evocation of the reality of their environment and their audience. Very few plays survive, but among them is the Mayan-Quiché Rabinal Achí, set in Guatemala, which is known to have ceased to be performed during the Caste War due to prohibition by the Spanish. Its persistence to this day—although perhaps not in its original form—honors the resistance of the indigenous peoples and nations who, through early performances and under their own references, found a way to process and cite the reality they faced.

This exhibition takes this reference to dramaturgy as a tool for catharsis and living narrative for ethnic groups and indigenous peoples and seeks to build a bridge between theatrical productions—theater or performance. It honors the theatrical in Mayan and Mesoamerican communities, but also frames the emergence of a generation of young artists who, among other outlets, materialize and above all embody their work through performative developments that allow them to address the issues of a territory and the bodies that inhabit it. Identities, corporealities, and lands that have been and continue to be exoticized, displaced, used, and exploited by the tourism industry and the white-heteropatriarchal-capitalist framework.

This exhibition—promoted by Proyecto Y and Catherine Petitgas, with the support of Fritzia Irizar and Óscar García Castro—does not refer specifically to theatrical practices as such, but rather to the performative involvement that these authors take on to narrate a political context that actively affects them and concerns them as inhabitants and members of the Yucatecan biosphere. It is sustained by a certain sense of humor in a game that actually attempts to name some of the sociopolitical inclemencies of the territory as dramaturgies of power systems. Through photography, video performance, and collaboration with the public as active participants in their work, the artists in this exhibition present a series of pieces that expose the tensions and perspectives of local people in relation to visitors who consume continuously in a land that has a long history of displacement and dispossession that still reaches, in other forms and with other essences, to the present day.

— Pequod Co.