Sweet Death - National Pavilion of Guatemala




The theme of this exhibition is inspired by the book of Thomas Mann, the film of Visconti, from the opera by Britten, but mainly deals with the concept of "death-finitude" understood as decline and loss of values in contemporary society, but all expressed through the language of joy and colour, using a gentle approach and cuteness.
Exemplifying in this regard is the image offered by the cemetery in Chichicastenango, in Guatemala, where the tombs are colourful, children are playing in the niches, the young people kiss each other and the elderly laugh among the tombstones. Directly from Maya rituals, mourning retains its colours: white graves for fathers, for mothers turquoise, blue for children, yellow for grandparents. On this occasion exhibition artists from Guatemala and from Italy will face each other on the topic of death and on a useful trick to exorcise it. That trick will refer to the colourful chromatism of Guatemala's tombs, heredity of the Mayan culture. The exhibition will be structured as a game of overlapping roles, the result of a playful and osmotic relationship. Italian artists will give the Guatemalan Mayan touches and colouristic pushes, unlike Guatemala will offer examples of "diluted" art and "influenced" by colonialism. Then it will present an artistic multicoloured polygamy, without borders, with lavish sets and combinations between the sacred and the profane.