Xavier Ribas - Photographer

Mud. Installation grid

Mud is constructed as a grid of 30 photographs showing naked empty ground and landscapes. These are images of the site of the contemporary Maya village of Panabaj, on the shores of the Atitlan lake in Guatemala, which was buried under a mudslide on the night of the 5th of October 2005. A few days later, after having lost all hope of recovering buried bodies, the site was declared a mass grave. An estimated eight hundred people are still missing. Five months later, when these images were taken, one could still see the traces of what happened there since the village was buried: signs of diggings, mounds of mud, small shrines and footprints, wooden markers of where households and properties once stood. Because of the lack of trust in the government concerning their relocation, a situation partly inherited from the violence and atrocities impinged on them by Ríos Montt's military regime, the community is planing to build their new homes on the same spot, five metres above the old ones, in what feels like an incoungruous inversion: the ancient Maya buried their dead in the grounds of the domestic compound; here in Panabaj, the contemporary Mayas will build new homes on top of a mass grave. This sudden burial of a contemporary Maya village is not only a natural catastrophe, but a political one that exposes the enormous social contradictions and political failure of contemporary Guatemala.

Read an article about this work by Felix Vogel In Pavilion, Issue nr 10-11 (pp 175-181), Bucharest 2007 in www.pavilionmagazine.org or Download PDF of the article.

30 images | prev | next

Installation of Mud in Beyond The Country, an exhibition curated by Matt Packer at the Lewis Gluscksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland, October 2007

Google Maps shows the site after the mud slide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panabaj

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~floods/2005139Landslide.html

http://www.santiagoatitlan.com/Disaster/disaster1e.html