Multiple modalities
Guadalupe Maravilla’s Disease Thrower #10, 2011-2020 looks like a religious altar and is as tall as a man or an animal — maybe a coyote standing on its hind legs. The mixed media sculpture is constructed like an armature, and it has a feral quality. It’s wrapped in something white and fur-like — a secret substance that Maravilla says he invented in the microwave. From a distance, it looks light and wispy. But, were you allowed to touch it, you’d find that it’s as hard as the bark of a tree.
Suspended in its center is a golden- colored gong painted black around the edge, it has the feeling of a ceremonial object. At first glance, it almost looks like a target. Objects emerge from the hard fur beneath the gong: a green and purple tortilla basket, models of the molecular structure of ice and the inner ear. There are loofahs and gourds.
“There are a lot of layers,” Maravilla says. “A lot of layers.”
Disease Thrower #10 is part of Maravilla’s installation, which is set in an 861-square-foot gallery as part of SITE Santa Fe’s Displaced: Contemporary Artists Confront the Global Refugee Crisis. As in all of his work, it combines the two foremost traumas in his life: coming to the United States from El Salvador in 1984 as an unaccompanied 8-year-old and undergoing treatment for Stage 3 colon cancer 30 years later.
Maravilla’s immigration experience and his cancer are physically and psychologically inseparable for him and fused within his art practice. “Cancer comes from everywhere,” he says, “but for me, I am 100 percent certain that it came from the trauma of being separated from my family and just holding that energy in one place.”
Born Irvin Morazan, he changed his name in 2016, adopting the surname that his undocumented father uses to protect his identity. Growing up, Maravilla, 43, never told anyone about the churning in his gut that started during the two-and-a-half months he spent getting to California from El Salvador to escape his country’s civil war. He made the journey apart from his parents, smuggled by coyotes. The sick feeling became a permanent sensation — sitting in for fear, sadness, and grief.
And then things got better. He reunited with his family and grew up in New Jersey. When he was 27, he became a U.S. citizen. And his art career was taking off, with such triumphs as a 2012 Art Matters Grant and exhibitions and performances at major galleries
“Losing your home, your language, your culture, your native land — that’s extremely traumatic. Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, but he’s doing it for others.” — Brandee Caoba, SITE Santa Fe assistant curator
and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But no success was enough to stop what was happening inside of him.
Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation eradicated the cancer but ravaged his body. To regain his health, Maravilla was drawn to indigenous medical practices from around the world. In the Amazon, he says he purged his body of chemo drugs with kambo, a poison from the skin of the giant monkey frog that is used to treat chronic pain. At home in New York, he was transformed by the vibrations of gong baths — fully clothed meditative experiences where participants lie on the floor while a guide plays gongs over them.
By embracing these practices, Maravilla isn’t dismissing the value of traditional Western medicine, given that it kept him alive. But he says that other ideologies have their place, too. “The healing I did was really painful. It’s not this hippie- crunchy fun thing that only people with money can afford. These are ancient practices that can work.”
He began incorporating gongs in his art, which already contained elements meant to heal the trauma of undocumented immigrants. All of the Disease Thrower sculptures represent a type of cancer experienced by a family member or friend, and portions of them can be worn as headdresses, which he uses in performance. ( Disease Thrower #10, for instance, is about sinus cancer.) He sometimes uses the Disease Throwers in healing rituals with undocumented immigrant communities.
“I think of [the sculptures] as shrines, as healing instruments,” he says. “When they become activated I’ve seen other people heal, and that helps me heal.”
Despite it s intensely personal, dense content, Maravilla’s work is resonating in the art world, where there is a growing appetite for socially meaningful output from people who have experienced oppression and hardship on the global stage. In 2019, he received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and he’s had recent installations and performances at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jack Barrett Gallery in New York. SITE Santa Fe’s assistant curator, Brandee Caoba, says that when envisioning Displaced with SITE’s Phillips director and chief curator, Irene Hofmann, they didn’t consider trauma as a major theme, and yet it emerged in almost all of the work. “Losing your home, your language, your culture, your native land — that’s extremely traumatic. Maravilla’s work is autobiographical, but he’s doing it for others.”
Maravilla’s installation also includes a serpent sculpture, Cabeza del Espíritu, 2019-2020, which i s made f rom lodestones, magnets, and wood. And playing on one wall is a video, Los Purifiers, which documents a performance called Portals that Maravilla gave at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2019. “The video will contextualize Disease Thrower #10, as it features a number of sculptural headdresses being activated and worn,” Caoba says.
A mural- sized rendition of the Salvadoran children’s drawing game, Tripa Chuca, extends over two walls of Maravilla’s installation. In Tripa Chuca (Spanish for “dirty guts”), players draw lines to randomly placed points on a field, never overlapping one another’s routes. Maravilla includes Tripa Chuca in every installation. He grounds the work by playing the game with an undocumented person from the local community. As the game becomes increasingly complex, the lines coil and swirl together in a sort of mapped conversation that looks like nothing so much as a jumble of innards.
“I used to play this on a notepad with the kids I met along the way when I was crossing the border, as a distraction,” he says.
And then he leans forward in his chair, hands on his knees, and points out the uncomfortably obvious irony between the game’s evocative name and the reality of it in his adult life, how the two concepts twine side by side.
“Rotting Tripe,” he says in a tone that’s almost amused. “It’s interesting because I had cancer of the intestines.” ◀