Edgar Calel

  • Edgar Calel is a Maya Kaqchikel artist and poet from the midwestern highlands of Guatemala. His work delves into the cosmology of his people and how it uncomfortably interacts with Western epistemologies and systems of value. His practice often interrogates the relationships between indigeneity and its representation in the modern world, negotiating the untranslatability of specific ways of being in the world and the words that name them. Inevitably, this leads to a position of resistance to specific forms of symbolic and physical violence and discrimination Indigenous people endure in Latin America. Calel describes his practice not as art—a nonexistent word in Maya languages—in the Western sense, but as Naoj: a conflation of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. His work manifests as a communal form for production that involves his whole family and is connected to the activities that produce and maintain life in Chi Xot.

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Edgar Calel

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Edgar Calel is a Maya Kaqchikel artist and poet from the midwestern highlands of Guatemala. His work delves into the cosmology of his people and how it uncomfortably interacts with Western epistemologies and systems of value. His practice often interrogates the relationships between indigeneity and its representation in the modern world, negotiating the untranslatability of specific ways of being in the world and the words that name them. Inevitably, this leads to a position of resistance to specific forms of symbolic and physical violence and discrimination Indigenous people endure in Latin America. Calel describes his practice not as art—a nonexistent word in Maya languages—in the Western sense, but as Naoj: a conflation of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. His work manifests as a communal form for production that involves his whole family and is connected to the activities that produce and maintain life in Chi Xot.