Archivo de los muertos (Archive of the Dead)

Marilyn Boror Bor is a Mayan-Kaqchikel artist from Guatemala who works in multiple mediums such as photography, installation, painting, print-making and performance. Her work is shaped by concerns around miscegenation, exploring elements from contemporary Mayan cultures, langauge and the written word.
Edicto Cambio de Nombre (Name Change Edict) is a series the artist defines as an “embodied durational performance”. Marilyn Elany Boror Bor changed her surnames of Kaqchikel origin for two surnames of Hispanic origin: Castillo Novella. If a name change seems like an irrelevant act, in a context such as Guatemala’s it takes on a scope of identity resistance. By way of an administrative gesture that takes the form of an artwork, this act rattles the racist and colonial system the artist believes should be urgently questioned. The change of surnames is a form of response to the idea of the illustrated modern nation imposed by creole thought and by the bourgeois elites that kept power after independence from colonial control. Thus, she denounces how the burgeoning republics maintained the metaphor of mestizaje, or miscegenation, and the cultural crucible processes of cleansing and social and cultural whitening which make Indigenous populations and populations of African descent invisible across Latin America.

Suset Sánchez Sánchez