We are thrilled to share with you that Gala Porras-Kim (Bogotá, 1984) and Antonio Vega Macotela (Mexico City, 1980) will participate in the 34th São Paulo Biennial, “Faz escuro mas eu canto” [Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing], that will take place from September 4th to December 5th 2021.

Gala Porras-Kim has thoroughly investigated the sacred cenote of Chichén Itzá –the offering place for Chaac– and more particularly the process and laws that allowed the transfer of the objects found underwater in the beginning of the 20th century to their current institutional locations: the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the Field Museum in Chicago, and INAH in Mexico. In this installation commissioned by the 34th Biennial, the artist creates a copal form –a fossilized resin, similar to amber, which had sacred powers for the Mayans– of equal volume to the objects taken from the cenote and now located at the Field Museum. She then mixed it with dust that had fallen from them during their time in storage. The Biennial is invited to figure out a way to get rainwater onto it and reunite the material with the rain.

On the other hand, Antonio Vega Macotela began traveling the world in 2016 with a group of hackers, forming a bond of trust and understanding with them. From this relationship emerges "The Q’aqchas ballade: Ghost Blankets" (2021), in which the artist relates the activities of the hackers with those of the Q’aqchas, illegal miners active in Bolivia’s Potosí region during the 18th century. Although at first glance the panels only contain pieces of skin, for those who know how to look, they also carry part of the lost history of the Q’aqchas, and say a lot about the relationships between the political systems of various Latin-American countries and big multinationals, encrypted in the texture of the skins using the technique of UV mapping. For security reasons, the group of hackers who developed the information remains anonymous.