Ghettoblaster Headdress

Escaping the civil war in 1984, at the age of eight, Guadalupe Maravilla emigrated to the USA from El Salvador as part of the first wave of undocumented, unaccompanied children arriving fom Central America. Maravilla has articulated her story as a migrant at the heart of Latin commuities in the USA, utilising art as a space of healing in a shamanic and collective rite context. Her mutilimedia work, moreover, develops into a popular-urban ritual connecting the multicultural present to Indigenous ancestral expressions, Maya traditions and experiences of healing.
Ghettoblaster Headdress is an example of the exuberant sculptural headdresses, the fantastical simulations of pre-Columbian garments that the artist uses in her performances. These ritual masks combine the essence of New York’s urban culture from Brooklyn, where Maravilla grew up, with pre-Hispanic imaginaries. Her performances are large-scale interventions melding hip-hop, theatre, sound, video and the plurality of characters and archetypes interacting with spectators. In relation to this hybrid aesthetic, Maravilla explains: “I’m deeply related to my Indigenous roots […] Mayan […], and I wanted to continue this legacy using the world that surrounds me […]  Mayan culture shares a similar aesthetic to hip-hop culture: for instance, the Mayans would pierce their teeth with jade. [So] I started to see […] these parallels between […] Mayan culture and hip-hop and punk cultures…”.

Suset Sánchez Sánchez