Since its founding in 1978, the Paiz Art Biennial has been Central America’s premier contemporary art event, ranking as the world’s sixth-oldest and Latin America’s second-oldest Biennial.
Its 24th edition, “The World Tree”, draws inspiration from the archetype of the “Tree of Life”, central to numerous ancient cosmogonies, including the Mayan tradition, where it connects different layers of existence, bridging the physical, spiritual, and speculative realms.
“Chontalli aquí, chontalli allá” situates Elyla’s practice within an urgent gesture: activating ancestral memories silenced by colonial history through embodied experience, expanding the horizons of fields such as history and archeology. Here, art does not illustrate; it orients open method of territory and summons forms of knowledge that grow from the body, spirituality and relationships with land.
From a Chantal and sex-dissident perspective, the artist reacrticulates the term Chontalli – “foreigner” in Nahuatl – transforming it into living root and collective horizon. Through ritual, sculpture, archival practices, and community collaboration, she reactivates the archeological site of Piedras Pintadas, in Villa Sandino, her birthplace, as a ceremonial space and memory portal: not a remnant, but a body that remembers, sings and blooms.
This project proposes an artistic methodology that can precede and guide academic frameworks. Resonating with this process are historian Dr. Victoria González Rivera, archeologist Dr. Rigoberto Navarro Genie, and Professor Roselia Vázquez, Tsome (Chontal) speaker and activist, land defender of the Sierra –Contal Alta– from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico.
This amatory and pedagogical repository, along with the sculptures, images and ceremonial actions that surround it, forms a living counter-archive: a practice that does not simply revisit the past, but creates conditions for its future rewriting, inviting us to listen to what bodies, stones and communities have always known.
Read moreThe Fundación Paiz para la Educación y la Cultura presents the complete list of 46 participants and collectives, as well as the 11 venues, for the 24th edition of the Bienal de Arte Paiz. Unprecedented in scale, ambition, scope, number of artists, and venues diversity, this edition, curated by acclaimed Italian curator Eugenio Viola, Artistic Director of MAMBO (Bogotá Museum of Modern Art), marks a historic milestone. Extending over three months, the Biennial, for the first time, unites artists from all five continents, presenting works in both exhibition spaces and public areas.
“The World Tree” is a project that utilizes a decentralized, non-hierarchical narrative to challenge conventional geopolitical frameworks, while forging connections across cultural genealogies from Meso and Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and its diaspora, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania.
The majority of the works—thirty—are new productions, conceived to engage with the curatorial theme and respond to the historical and architectural contexts of the exhibition sites. The osmosis between exhibition spaces and public areas will enhance collaboration and collective action, examining the contexts in which people interact.
Eugenio Viola reflects: “Similar to the synaptic cartography of the “dendritic tree” in neuroscience, which maps the complex connections within neural networks, ‘The World Tree’ opens up a constellation of voices, reimagined as a synaptic map, which visualizes our society as an interconnected network—a fluid cartography of human relations, social bonds, and cultural exchanges. It connects different realms of existence, and various times and experiences—the horizontal and the vertical, the ancestral and the present, the collective and the individual, the ephemeral and the utopian, rupture and regeneration—inviting us to recognize how exchanges and mutual influences shape our experiences and perspectives.”
Reimagined as a multidimensional network, “The World Tree” ties diverse temporalities and geographies—ancient roots, digital landscapes, psychological depths, and utopian futures —forming a counter-cartography of resistance, resilience, and hope. In an era of global connectivity marred by conflict, displacement, and intolerance, “The World Tree” positions art as a critical tool to confront these challenges, reframe identity and diversity, and envision inclusive futures.
