Son[i]a #440

Marilyn Boror Bor (b. San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala, 1984) is a Maya-Kaqchikel artist from San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala, whose work explores memory and the wound. Her voice emerges from a territory marked by colonisation and internal armed conflict—a civil war lasting more than three decades—which persecuted and silenced indigenous languages, customs, and worldviews. A process of repression and assimilation that interrupted the transmission of knowledge, whitewashed history and fractured the memory of a predominantly indigenous country, where twenty-three Mayan languages are still spoken.

Through language, weaving, drawing, ceramics, the body, and dialogue with communities and the land, Marilyn questions colonial structures, dismantles the (white) canon of contemporary art, and suggests other ways of looking, of thinking, and creating. Her practice is one of continuous resistance against institutionalised racism, extractivism and the violence of oblivion. Her work is memory, collectivity and resistance: words that heal and name that which has been silenced. In it, language is matter, weaving is the land, the body is denunciation, and art becomes a way of speaking, healing, and resisting.

In this conversation, we talk with Marilyn Boror Bor about languages, textiles, relationality, extractivism, and cement. She tells us about the slow violence of processes of assimilation, about the importance of the Mayan language and culture, and of how colonisation has demonised ancestral knowledge. She recounts what it means to live in a land perforated by a cement factory, where water scarcity becomes the norm and mountains are drilled until they lose their spirit. Hence the urgency of the connection to the land and indigenous struggles, which are not new, but have always existed: a millennial memory that still breathes.