Xar – Sueño de obsidiana (Blue Bird – Obsidian Dream)
Description:
XAR – Sueño de Obsidiana (Blue Bird – Obsidian Dream) is a film by Edgar Calel (1987, Chi Xot, Guatemala), directed by Fernando Pereira dos Santos and titled after a poem written by the artist in his mother tongue, Maya Kaqchikel. The poem serves as a guiding thread as the film moves through the vast Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo, the iconic modernist structure designed by Oscar Niemeyer, which—emptied during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic—becomes a space capable of hosting the multiple subjectivities and rituals embodied by the artist. The work emerged during the global lockdown, when the exceptional circumstances allowed Calel to undertake an introspective gesture within a space normally filled with people, while also connecting with the ancestors of the Tupi-Guarani peoples who once inhabited that area of São Paulo. In 1906, the site became Ibirapuera Park, taking its name from the Indigenous village destroyed to make way for the Pavilion. Guided by obsidian—a stone with divinatory properties in Maya culture—Calel inhabits a dreamlike realm and, wearing a jaguar pelt, a central figure in Mesoamerican cosmology, moves between the world of the living and that of the spirits. The artist’s body multiplies, acting as a mediator for ancestral presences and becoming an instrument for listening to and invoking other languages and Indigenous sounds of the animal world. The names of the 22 Maya languages appearing on his garment ultimately form a map of plural knowledge, a chorus of identities that challenges the homogeneity of the dominant thought embodied by modernist architecture. ML
