“War, violence, resources—it was all connected.”
In her work, Regina José Galindo subjects her body to the experiences of others. Her performances explore not only the histories and circumstances of people from her native Guatemala, but also the violence that power structures wreak around the world. For Galindo, the everyday lives of women, the disenfranchisement and decimation of Indigenous populations, the exploitation of nature, civil war, and the migration of Guatemalans to the United States are all interconnected through a colonial past and neo-colonial present. Today, these connections are structured around extraction—regardless of whether the commodity being extracted is a natural resource, like gold, or human labor, through contemporary forms of slavery.
Galindo was born in Guatemala City during a brutal civil war (1960–96) in which over 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or forcibly disappeared. A poet and pioneer of performance art, she is part of a generation of artists who came together after the end of the war. “Around 1997, ’98, and ’99, there was a feeling that things were about to change,” she remembered. “There was a degree of peace, and...we went out onto the streets. We started to produce art in public spaces. That was the moment when I went from the written word to visual poetry.” Early works, such as ¿Quién puede borrar las huellas? (Who Can Erase the Traces?) (2003), point to the war’s unacknowledged traumas and lingering social effects, the impunity of its most violent perpetrators, and the unfulfilled promises of the peace agreement.
To make America’s Family Prison (2008), the artist, her husband, and their young daughter spent 24 hours in a cell manufactured by a private prison company in the US, documenting their day in prison on video. Installed in an art gallery in San Antonio, Texas, the slick, prefabricated cube was designed to hold migrant families—many fleeing violence—from Central America. “The past and its atrocities continue to wreak havoc in the present and to mark our future,” Galindo has said.
For Looting (2010), Galindo hired a dentist in Guatemala to drill holes in her molars and fill them with gold from that country. She later traveled to Germany, where a doctor extracted the gold fillings, completing the cycle of resource extraction and migration. “In Looting, my mouth acts as a metaphor for my land,” Galindo has said. “My mouth represents my country, rich in resources, virgin, immaculate. The drill represents the extraction industry, drilling wantonly, stealing gold without any moral qualms.” Looting enacts the violence of extractive economies, like mining, as well as the illegal ways in which many artifacts have entered museum collections worldwide.
Like Looting, the video Tierra (2013) explores the connection between the exploitation of human lives and natural resources. In it, the artist stands naked and motionless in a field while an excavator digs an enormous ditch around her, leaving only the small patch of land on which she stands. Her performance reinterprets a massacre of Indigenous people during the civil war that became public in 2012, during the trial of the former dictator Efraín Rios Montt. “War, violence, resources—it was all connected,” Galindo has said. “A performance is not enough to express empathy, or rage, before a tragedy of that magnitude. But we do what we can.”
Julia Detchon, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2024