Representing the censorship about the theater in the seventies in Guatemala, the creation of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, along with the poet Wingston González, Place of comfortwill be exposed in the Modern Art Museum in New York (MoMA), after this place acquired the pieces permanently.
The work, inspired by the attack suffered by the Popular University Theater company during the premiere of the play The heart of scarecrows At the time of the armed conflict, it is a tribute to the theater as a political resistance channel. This fact, which now transcends Guatemala to an international scenario, will give you unique recognition.
As detailed by the Paiz Foundation of Guatemala, the collection, which was permanently acquired by MoMA, includes aquatintas, sketches and a performance video created by the Guatemalan artist, who has achieved international fame and recognition.
The Foundation emphasizes that the acquisition was presented at the twenty -second Biennial of Art Paiz and that the work was cured by Alexia Tala and Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer in Guatemala.
Next to the sketches, the collection includes the costumes and accessories of the five performance characters that represent the attack, the 27 sketches in watercolor and nine aquatintas.
About the work
The work, presented in video performance format, recreates the historical memory of the actors and what they lived when presenting the work written by Hugo Carrillo in 1962, which was staging in 1975 by a cast of students of the Popular University of Guatemala City.
As explained by the Modern Art Museum of Medellín, this adaptation presents the actors representing a time agitated by a time of state executions and disappearances, becoming a complaint against the Government.
“The students of the students raised a violent reaction of censorship, death threats, the murder of an actor and a fire that destroyed the theater, events that occurred after a minister visited one of his presentations,” the museum details.
For this video representation, author Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa decided to expose the sketches of the characters’s costume design process. Also, these works present the attributes of the characters and their accessories.
“In these sketches we find, in their attributes and accessories, the emergence of their personalities, their attitudes and the nuances of their voices,” says the museum where this work was once exhibited, which now arrives in New York.