Elegy for a State That Still Kills Us 

This installation stages mourning and resistance side by side. At the center sits Nahua-Mestize artist ARIA XYX’s Pipián, Culero, Maricón from the series El peso de tus palabras (The Weight of Your Words), reclaiming slurs historically used to discipline queer bodies and requiring proximity to be felt. Rendered in white-on-white embossed paper, the words resist immediate legibility, insisting that linguistic violence is only fully understood when it enters the body.

Framing this core is a diptych by Afro-Indigenous-Mestizo artist Hugo Rivas from Vulgar: Revisiones del imaginario patriótico (Vulgar: Revision of the Patriotic Imaginary). The left drawing stages a funeral for the Salvadoran flag, burying the nation-state that continues to kill queer people. The right drawing reclaims the figure of the ex-combatant through Indigiqueer intervention, transforming a symbol of war into one of vitality, sparkle, celebration, and refusal. The only rupture of colour comes from the red chachal by K’iche’ Maya artist Luis Fernando Morales, its hand-crocheted crystals carrying both the spilled blood of Indigenous queer lives lost in El Salvador and the pulse of life that refuses erasure.

Māori artist Matt Tini’s self-portraits on handmade harakeke paper extend this resistance materially. The Indigenous fibre holds land and sovereignty, while inkjet printing appears as a foreign intrusion that the paper unevenly absorbs, marking acts of refusal. The portraits frame adornment as a queer strategy of survival. Maya-Mestizo Volcacitto (Juan José Guillén)’s small metal angels remain as witnesses, guarding queer memory along Guatemala’s Pacific coast. Mourning and celebration coexist. The violence continues, and so does our resistance.