Flag Series: Kaqjay, Lienzo para Guiarse en un Viaje de Ida y Vuelta, 2024

 

For the next iteration of our Flag Series, Americas Society has invited the Mayan Kaqchikel Kaqjay Collective to create a new work titled, Lienzo para Guiarse en un Viaje de Ida y Vuelta (2024).

The collective will craft a lienzo—an Indigenous pictographic document—using traditional Guatemalan techniques and materials. The lienzo will be woven on a telar (a traditional loom) and embroidered with maps from the 18th and 19th centuries, depicting the collective's home region. In this project, the Kaqjay collective transforms the idea of a flag into a map, focusing instead on the historical context of the Mayan-Kaqchikel community, rather than the concept of a nation.

For the Kaqjay, the lienzo seeks to put the community, with their contemporary and ancient knowledge, at the center of all their representations. It also offers itself as a guide for the return of migrants who have left and the ancient objects which have been extracted from the region. This form of cartography is an exercise in returning knowledge-power to the community. Through this process, the Collective aims to rethink the link between the complex and diverse community life and territory, with the goal of reappropriation, reterritorialization, and healing.

The idea of a lienzo is to guide oneself on a round-trip arises from the idea that, in our contact with other cultural and political spaces, we often lose orientation. The lienzo evokes the memory of the community as a way of creating symbols that locate us when we come into contact with other places, ideas, powers, or senses. It is an effort to recognize the interactions in and with the physical and symbolic space, and to recognize and return community relationships to ourselves. For the Indigenous Maya-Kaqchikel, leaving the community prompts the important action of welcome and farewell rituals. They ask: what is the meaning of returning? What does returning imply?

A key part of the project will be a farewell ceremony in Patzicía, Guatemala in which the collective will honor the lienzo before it travels to New York, mirroring the farewells held for migrants leaving the region. The lienzo’s welcoming ceremony will take place during the opening reception for Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, an exhibition that includes Altar de Kaqjay (2021), a collaborative installation by Cortez, Kaqjay, and Fiebre Ediciones. This steel work evokes an altar that has not been moved from the ceremonial center where it was located in ancient times, Kaqjay.

The Flag Series presents public artworks on 68th Street, furthering Americas Society’s engagement with the surrounding community in New York and creating new dialogues between artists of the Americas and our audiences.

Lienzo para Guiarse en un Viaje de Ida y Vuelta will be on view from January 29 through May 17, 2025. 

About the Collective

Kaqjay is a Mayan-Kaqchikel collective dedicated to social research and creative co-production. The collective focuses its efforts on the reconstruction of Kaqchikel history, memory, and identity.