Robin Canul is a witness to the greed that devastates the jungles of southern Mexico. This journalist from Yucatán has documented with his camera how the metal jaws of agro-industrial machines uproot forest trees to make room for enormous plantations of soybeans, sugar cane or rice. The predatory fang has advanced so much that it puts paradises like Bacalar, the turquoise lagoon that is one of the jewels of Quinta Roo, at risk. “Very important changes are happening in the jungle and very few people know about it,” denounces Canul in front of an image that shows a tractor destroying a piece of foliage, one of the photographs of him that is part of the exhibition. Art: territories of denunciation organized by the Tlatelolco Cultural Center, UNAM, in the center of Mexico City. “It is only a very minimal postcard of the magnitude of what is being lost in the jungle, of the rupture of this biological corridor by agroindustry,” says the photographer.
The destruction of the jungles of southern Mexico is one of the many nightmares denounced by the exhibition, open to the public from this week until September 8. 22 artists from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and creators from southern Mexico participate, a vast area that the poet Rodrigo Balám, from Chiapas, has designated as the “Northern Quadrangle.” Many of these artists have suffered violence and harassment that seeks to silence them, but also political persecution, displacement and exile. “Art is also a manifestation of freedom of expression, which is why it is also being attacked and persecuted in some of these countries and, however, it is a speaker that allows these discourses of freedom throughout the region to be defended, supported, accompanied and listened to,” explains Sofía Carrillo, curator of the exhibition.
Photographer Canul began documenting the destruction of the jungles in 2012. His love for the Mayan territory and the culture of which he is a part led him to listen carefully to the complaints of local groups and their cry for help, almost never heard by The authorities. “I understood that the cultural landscape and the social landscape were changing and I decided to appropriate the documentary record, through audio, long-term photography and video to tell what is happening in the peninsular Mayan territory and look with different eyes at the agroindustry, pig farms, wind farms and new projects such as the Mayan Train and working with community-based groups that are defending the territory,” explains Canul. His photographs convey to the viewer anger, indignation, frustration, but also hope. In them you can see the ravages of destruction, yes, hundreds of dead trees in enormous territories devastated for large-scale agriculture, but you can also see the smile of a girl who excitedly shows an ear of corn. “I try to disseminate what is happening with the entry of these industries that no one asked for,” says Canul, who keeps a detailed record of the damage caused by large companies (he mentions Monsanto, Bayer and even Mennonite groups) in the Mayan territories.
Canul does not hide his indignation at the apathy of the authorities, although the residents' struggle has borne fruit, such as the Supreme Court ruling that revoked Monsanto's permits for the planting of transgenic soybeans in Mexico, which he defines as “ a world victory.” The photographer adds that despite this achievement, the ecological damage continues in the region. “He has done very serious damage to the health of the population, to the ecosystems, to the water due to pesticide contamination,” laments the artist.
The destruction of the jungle joins other horrors, such as the political violence of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and its terrible consequences, among which the exile of its artists, journalists and intellectuals stands out. The exhibition does not mince words and names these situations without adjectives: “dictatorship”, it calls the Ortega regime, which has caused the artist Milena García, who defines herself as a political dissident, to leave the country. García presents his work in her exhibition We live waiting, in which he reflects on “time and the expectation that things will never change,” that wait abroad that “acquires a crucial dimension in the processes of forced displacement, transit and application for political asylum,” they explain from The exhibition. A wait that “becomes a space full of tension and uncertainty.” The demon of exile, in short, exorcised with the help of art.
To the plunder and greed, to the official neglect, are added the violence of organized crime, the human desperation of the millions of migrants who cross the region in search of a better life in the United States, the separation of families decreed by the measures imposed by Donal Trump, the thirst claimed by entire populations who are denied access to water or who have been deprived of that resource or the anguish of the victims of the “exception regime” imposed by President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador , an excessive use of force to stop violence, but which has filled the prison with people who are accused without being able to access fair processes.
Sofía Carrillo, the curator of the exhibition, was aware along with her team of the strength of these stories, so they tried to make the exhibition “light”, so that the experience of those who visit it was not traumatic, but rather a beautiful call of alert from art and with the voices of artists. “We felt that we were taking the curatorial script towards a very dense vision, everything showed pain, and we understood that we wanted to talk about art as a tool and a manifestation of freedom,” she explains. This is how the exhibition invites visitors to navigate images, sounds, the voices of those who suffer abuses, but also that world of colors and beauty that forms the great expanse of what is known as Mesoamerica. “It is putting a loudspeaker so that it can be heard, to defend freedom of expression as a basic human right, because art becomes a form of denunciation,” says the curator. This space, she adds, brings together artists who are at risk, who are persecuted and threatened. There, in that emblematic place of Tlatelolco, the mythical region of Mexico City where the students shouted freedom, these artists find the place to shout in turn the pain that hits their communities, the violence and the plunder.
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