Antonio Pichillá

Antonio Pichillá is an artist from the Maya Tz’utujil tradition who, like many practitioners outside of Western tradition, is also a healer and a spiritual guide in his community. It is from his studio at Lake Atitlán that he looks for a bond that integrates with the environment as something inaccurate and uncodified. The artist’s interdisciplinary practice is driven by anthropological  research in both the urban and rural regions of Guatemala. Constructing and intervening in a variety of methods, materials, forms, objects, and rituals, Pichillá’s works are expressions of the everyday that are indexical of temporality. Through an investigation that spans over ten years, Pichilla has strived to bring closer the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations of Guatemala which, in a country plagued with internalized racism, is not only necessary, but has also invested his work with a political significance.