(intense music) (audience chattering) - Welcome, everyone, to the "Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series."

(intense music) (audience applauding) Welcome, everyone, to the "Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series."

My name is Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director.

Today we bring you sculptor and performance artist, activist and healer, Guadalupe Maravilla.

And a big thank you to our longtime partner, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, or UMA, and our series partners, the UM Arts Initiative, Detroit Public Television, PBS Books, WNET's ALL ARTs, and Michigan Public.

Today's event is part of the U of M Arts initiative's.

focus on the theme, Take Care.

This is exploring the power of art to help us process the current moment, caring for oneself and others during challenging times, personal and community healing as a means of collective resilience, and how artistic expression helps to create the world that we all want to live in.

And what a perfect guest to have for that moment.

Yeah, so we're very thankful that we have Guadalupe with us in this time.

I wanna let you all know, I have one fun announcement for you.

This evening, if you're looking for somewhere else to get away from any madness, tonight, directly following this event, at the Institute for the Humanities, another one of our great partners, there is an opening of their new exhibition in the gallery space, called "Touch."

And this exhibition is presenting work of Mexican American artist Ericka Lopez, who was born with limited vision and is now completely blind.

And her process of making is almost entirely informed by her memory of color.

The exhibition actually invites the viewers to touch the objects on display, which is wonderful.

Guadalupe and I actually went over there today just before this.

So the visitor becomes an active participant and it's a great opportunity for deeper connection and recognition and celebration of this incredible artist's breadth of view.

So I highly recommend going over there.

They'll have an opening there, they always have food.

It's fun, and you can touch the art.

That's directly following this, at the Institute for Humanities.

Now, please do remember to silence those cell phones or better yet, take a break from technology.

We will have time for a Q&A today.

You'll see there are microphones on stands at the end of each of these aisles.

So when we get to that moment at the end of Guadalupe's talk, when he's ready for questions, he will invite you to come down to the microphones and we'll see how many questions he can get to.

And now, for some words of introduction of our guest today, please welcome Stamp's School Professor and Dean for Research, Creative Practice and Graduate Education, Dylan Miner.

(audience applauding) - The University of Michigan's three campuses are located on the lands of the Anishinaabeg and Wyandot peoples, land ceded under the Treaty of Detroit in 1807 and the 1817 treaty at the foot of the Rapids, which acknowledges the college at Detroit.

Tonight's artist, speaker, Guadalupe Maravilla, grounds his transdisciplinary artistic practice in activism and healing.

He combines sculpture, painting, and performative acts and installation to engage a wide variety of visual cultures.

The healing presence of Guadalupe Maravilla is particularly warranted and needed this week, as his work employs mutual aid and healing as their core aesthetic and social formation.

His work is autobiographical, referencing his own unaccompanied, undocumented migration to the US due to the Civil War in El Salvador.

For those of you who are not historians, I ask that you reflect on the fact that Guadalupe Maravilla's migration to the US, as well as contemporary migration, cannot be decoupled from the US economic and military interventions in Mexico, Central America and other countries in Latin America, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s.

This is Guadalupe Maravilla's story.

This is the story of the United States.

And this is the story of Abya Yala, Turtle Island, the Americas.

In fact, as a counter to US colonial history and recent dehumanizing political rhetoric, Maravilla's work remains especially salient today as the current president-elect campaigned around mass deportations, something we all must fundamentally resist from a humanitarian perspective.

The president-elect's particularly violent form of nationalism, which vilifies far too many, finds an antidote in the healing capabilities of artists like Guadalupe Maravilla, who is also a teacher and mutual aid organized.

However, even recent calls for mass deportation are not new.

Rather, the US government did a similar forced deportation of Mexican nationals, Chicanos, and other Latinx peoples during the Great Depression.

That campaign during the 1930s likely deported over 1 million individuals, approximately 60% being US citizens.

This is our shared history and whether we like it or not, the current political rhetoric, although violent and dehumanizing, is nothing new here in the US, and so we often turn to artists in times like this.

As an artist, Guadalupe Maravilla's work extends beyond the sculptural practice to consider forms of community-based healing and regeneration.

Maravilla frequently activates his artistic objects through performances and sound baths, a meditative experience where participants are bathed in sound frequencies meant to encourage therapeutic and restorative healing.

Restorative healing, as Maravilla offers us, is particularly needed by many, including those of us in the audience tonight.

His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and countless other collections.

Maravilla's work is presently included in the 12th Goteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in Sweden and the 35th Bienal De Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Please welcome to the stage Guadalupe Maravilla.

(audience applauding) - Thank you for the introduction.

Thank you everyone for coming today.

Thank you Penny Stamps, Michigan University for inviting me.

It's just an honor to be here.

So again, thank you for making time to be present here in this space with me.

It's really important.

It's so beautiful to see so many faces here.

So we're just gonna get right into it.

And I'm gonna really first start talking with, before I even get into the sculptures, I'm gonna talk about some of the mutual aid work and some of the healing work that I've been doing over the years.

So before the pandemic, I was working with undocumented community.

I got a source grant, and for two years I was doing these workshops to teach a lot of the healing practices that I picked up.

Part of my story is being an unaccompanied, undocumented child, escaping a civil war from El Salva to United States in the '80s, but also part of my work, everything revolves around that, but also overcoming cancer 12 years ago.

So right, like these two challenges kind of show up in many different ways in my work, but not only talking about what happened, but also how to heal from it, right?

So healing from all this and so many other things that have happened in my life is what my work's about.

So when I talk about a lot of...

I guess sometimes I get asked questions, what materials do you work with, right?

And I talk about my material is my story, it's my life story.

And my story is one of millions of people that have been displaced all over the world.

There's so many stories of people dealing with cancer and overcoming cancer and being challenged with, like, cancer.

So it's, like, my story, it's not very unique, it's just like overall happening all over.

So a lot of the...

I always talk about how cancer was my biggest teacher and it's still teaching me a lot.

During my cancer journey, I learned about how sound is medicine.

I learned about Indigenous ways to heal the body.

I learned how sound plants our medicine as well.

All these alternative ways to heal the body, different meditations.

I work with healers from China to Tibet, Korea, healers from Europe and Indigenous healers from the US, from Mexico, Central America, and South America, right?

So I learned all these ancient ways.

I also learned about new ways to heal the body.

And I have this approach to healing as an artist, right, kind of like inventing my own ways to heal and that kind of expands, it's like really kind of keeps growing.

I feel like I'm a sponge of just absorbing all these different ways to heal the spirit, the mind and the body, right?

There's different challenges that come to us as we grow and mature and we live life, right?

So it's really important to have these tools.

So I'm here to share, like, the tools that I have, right, through my work.

So for these two years before the pandemic, every Saturday I would come together with a group of people that were part of the undocumented community.

And my whole concept was like, really, I need to share the knowledge that I picked up over the years.

And I was able to hire a different healer once a week to co-teach the class with me.

I would do the sound work and talk about my experiences and the practitioner would teach us, like, I brought everyone from like, someone teaches yoga, someone teaches meditation.

I brought in someone, a nutritionist, someone from the city of New York that taught us where to buy organic affordable produce, which is really hard to get because food is also political.

Only people with a lot of money can eat well, right?

So there's politics behind food.

And I brought in a pastor, witches, shamans from all over the world to teach us different ways to heal and to protect ourselves just from the challenges of the world.

And also, for this particular group, just to, like, we have to heal from migration, we have to heal from being displaced, we have to heal from all these different things.

I also had a cancer group that would come in and also I did work with them very different, right?

So in this image, here I'm doing a sound ceremony and I'll talk more about the sound as we go along.

In this image, there's a botanist teaching us about the medicinal qualities in just the weeds that are growing in the alleyways in New York City and the power of some of these plants.

They're survivors, no one's cultivated them, these grow and they actually have medicinal qualities, which is something I didn't know about.

And here we're making tinctures.

So anyway, so this went on for two years and it was really healthy and really beautiful and we just kind of like went forward like, and we had a group of about 20 people that kept coming every week.

And we would finish every session, I would hire a chef, a Salvadorian chef, and she would cook pre-Hispanic foods, like all natural, very kind of the ancient ways of cooking the food without any meats or any dairy and like before the Americans were colonized, right?

So that kind of cuisine, and just to teach us about what our ancestors were eating.

And here's a quick little video of me playing the gongs, and I had an acupuncturist do acupuncture while I was playing the gongs.

(hypnotic music) So when the pandemic hit, this community was really affected.

And, you know, thinking about the way the election went a couple days ago too, I'm, like, really concerned about how they're gonna be impacted again.

So in this case, you know, a lot of them were working at restaurants.

All the restaurants closed at the very beginning of the pandemic.

They were working as nannies.

Those jobs were gone because everyone was home.

And they were cleaning homes.

So all those jobs, completely gone.

So I got my stimulus check from the government, split it in four and gave it to four families.

It just disappeared really fast, that money.

And then all those families and extended relatives started reaching out looking for help because they had nothing.

So then I put on my Instagram that I was collecting funds to help people and then basically people started...

I took care of the media community I was working with at first, but then friends of friends started calling me, just saying, "Guadalupe, like, I'm a family of six and I lost my job because of the pandemic and I have six kids and we're hungry."

Then some other families, like, "I'm an elderly person, like, I have no money, like, eat, can you help?"

So that kind of stuff started happening and I put it on my Instagram.

So I would just give them money and say, "Let me photograph your hands and post it."

And in four months I raised about $80,000, but the money would come sporadically.

So then, you know, I would show up, me and my friend, I would just give them the cash and, like, no questions, asked, "What is your situation?"

over the phone.

And it got to the point that there was a trans woman from Honduras that asked me, that they were in a very toxic, abusive household, that need to get out.

And then a family of three, a single mom with a baby, call me saying that they were hungry and I have $200 left.

I'm just like, "Okay, who do I help?"

right?

And how am I as an artist in this position for all these people that have, you know, their home country has failed them, this country has failed them, the world has failed them, they have nowhere to go.

They just need to eat, they need to survive.

And the money finally came in.

I was able to help them both just for that brief time.

And then more calls started coming in.

And then someone reached out to me, saying that there was a pastor in Brooklyn that was feeding 6,000 people per week, and he couldn't get volunteers because everyone's afraid to come out.

So I started going over there and, you know, at first it was just like delivering meals.

This is, like, the first week in the pandemic when New York got hit pretty hard.

Then I helped them build a, I guess, like a herb garden on top of the church.

And then I started using the money that I was getting to buy grains, so, like, my car was holding almost 2,000 pounds of rice, beans and corn flour that we used to make tortillas and tamales, this kind of thing in Latin America.

And then we would distribute them from other donations into smaller bags so they can have their grains to go with whatever donations they're getting.

And then we would distribute them, right?

So this is what I'm for three years, but right at that time is like when the pastor said, "Okay, also, like, the spirit's really low, so can you do their healing work here, what you were doing before?"

So then I started doing these healing ceremonies, which I'm gonna get into now, in the church.

(gong gonging) (hypnotic music) So during that time, I was working with an organization in New York and they're called Creative Time, and I was doing a project with them, again, during the pandemic and it was not even safe to be in the street.

Vaccines weren't available.

And then I saw this image of the Notre Dame Cathedral, and during World War II it had sandbags in the infrastructure to protect it from the cracking 'cause there was bombs falling everywhere.

It just reminded me of, like, these daily bags, hundreds of these bags that I was moving with the pastor, full of grains, right?

And then I started thinking of how grains get transported everywhere in the world.

And we had this amazing space in Queens, it's a science museum in Queens, that was vacant.

And the idea was very simple, it's actually to actually build three pyramids in this beautiful space, made out of the corn flour, the rice and the beans, and basically make them part of an art installation with some sculptures, do healing work there and at the end, use these pyramids and give them to food banks and to the church.

So basically turning a sculpture into food, right?

So that was the idea.

But during the install, this is more images of the space, during the install we're literally installing in the space and three people got COVID and there was no vaccine yet.

And we're just like, "This is not safe for us, for anyone, to come in here."

So we just scratched the project.

This is a projection that I was gonna have in the space.

And I made these sculptures, these vibrating sculptures, which I'll talk about now, as part of the show as well.

But I talk about this project because it was just like an urgent time where it was so much energy and effort into this and just didn't work.

And then basically, the whole premise of doing the healing work, it didn't make any sense.

So as soon as we got the vaccines is when my show in Socrates Sculpture Park opened and I was able to make an outdoor sculpture made out of almost 10,000 pounds of recycled metal.

And it's one of my Disease Throwers, which is what I call my sculptures because they're shrines, they're healing instruments.

And basically, I learned about sound as medicine when I had cancer.

When I was doing radiation treatments, I learned that I... Actually, I was struggling to walk after, like, my 23rd straight radiation treatment and someone took me to a sound ceremony and I laid on the floor and the healer was playing, it actually felt much better afterwards.

And I was able to walk and I was like, "Okay, when I survive this, I'm gonna learn how to, like, use this instrument as medicine," so... And before that, I have been aware that sound as medicine is nothing new.

Every continent uses sound as medicine.

If you think about, one of the healers that travels with me when I'm doing healing work, he uses a Tibetan throat singer.

He uses his throat as a vibrational healing instrument.

And that's a very ancient medicine.

He used to sing for the Dalai Lama himself.

And just really powerful what he does just with his vocals.

And if you think about it, every continent has some Indigenous kind of ceremonies that incorporates either singing or some drums or some percussion instruments or wind instruments or whatever.

Always sound is what carries some of these ceremonies.

Most all of those ceremonies, basically, unless say like, they're doing a meditation, which is usually silence, but sound is used very often and it has been for a long time in many different cultures.

So for the sculpture, I also poured hot metal into certain vegetables that were part of my healing journey from cancer and started making these molds.

And these molds eventually became welded onto the bigger sculpture that you see here.

And the gongs that I use are contemporary gongs.

They're related to the ones from Asia, but they're very different.

These are made in the US and then actually in Germany, and some of these gongs actually have the same sound frequency as planets.

So NASA discover that every planet has a vibrational sound frequency, and these gong makers figure out what the sound frequency is, and they have actually put that sound frequency in the gong so when I'm playing the gongs, you're feeling frequencies from planets or even different elements like water and fire and air and these kind of things.

So you're feeling that, but what's most important is the healer that's playing them, right?

I have a whole team of healers that travels everywhere with me and we do these ceremonies, but they're healers, they're different types of healers from all over the world and they practice meditation and do all kinds of work.

And when we're playing the gongs, we're actually, we're meditating and we're pretty much doing reiki to the gong.

So we're sending energy to the gong, channeling the light and sending the energy to the gong, and the gongs send energy everyone in space.

But that could also be done with any instrument.

So we play a lot of different instruments.

Here we're playing the sculptures in Socrates Sculpture Park, New York.

And this is the aerial view, one of the ceremonies here.

(intense music) (intense music continues) So that summer was really important for me because it was like the first time coming out of the pandemic for most people because the vaccines had just been... Everyone was getting vaccinated coming out for the first time.

So some of the ceremonies were from 400 people to like 1,000 people, I think was the biggest one.

And I had a lot of different healers and sound stations throughout the park, so sound was really amplified.

I had a medicinal garden that grew around the sculpture and we had a fire in the middle, which I was able to hire a healer that works with fire, a fire keeper, and they used the fire as a healing tool as well.

So yeah, it was like a really beautiful experience.

And then from that I had my solo show at MoMA.

And again, so I was finally able to use these sculptures that I showed before that I had made for that project, that Creative Time that got canceled.

And these sculptures... Years ago, I had a show in New Mexico and there was a person that was 100% deaf that was there, and they couldn't feel the vibration of the ceremonies.

So I decided to make these sculptures, these two that are in the image, they're these beds made out of metal and then they have all these layers on them.

But when I play the gong, the actual bed vibrates so you can actually feel, like, the vibration of the sculpture and feel the sound bath even if you can't hear.

So when I had this exhibition, they were exclusively used for anyone that was hearing impair or was deaf and they were able to actually feel, like, the healing of the vibration even though they couldn't hear.

And for this time also, we did 50 ceremonies at MoMA, so we were really active when we were there and it was me and part of the healers that travel with me.

So here's some more images of that show.

(intense music) Sound as medicine is something that's been going on for a long time, and today we're continuing that here, particularly using the gongs.

And they have the same frequencies as planetary systems and different elements and we use that as the healing tool.

That's what we're using today.

You know, the bodies are around 70% water and in this water we carry stress, we carry anxiety and sometimes we can even carry trauma, and vibration helps us release those tensions.

(hypnotic music) (intense music) (celestial music) So around that same time, I was doing all the work at the church and I think that year I did 120 ceremonies, both for the undocumented community and then 50 at MoMA.

And it felt like very much needed.

And at the same time I had this show at the Brooklyn Museum, so it's like very busy time for me.

And this show at the Brooklyn Museum talks about four different types of displacement, my own displacement from El Salvador and I talk about displacement of...

I'll show you a quick clip of a video, 'cause I went into a detention center and did a performance with some teenagers that were in the detention center.

So I talk about that displacement, it's a different generation from the same place.

And the museum has a collection of objects from all over the world that were at some point looted and stolen and somehow there in a museum in New York.

So I was actually fortunate that I was able to display those objects along with my work, and I'll show those.

There's another one of my Disease Throwers, another vibrational bed that, when I play the gong, it vibrates and it has a video, an eye of my cat, Wifi is her name, and she's a healer.

I know, like, I love cats and I feel like they're healing instruments as well, especially when they go and purr and they knead on you, they're doing some vibration, you know, so they're definitely healers, those that have cats here, like, I totally love them.

So this is like a match to her.

She's a little black cat.

She's just not as frightening as this thing, (audience laughing) which is very sweet.

So part of the work too is that I... All the materials that you see here, so basically for me, one of the most challenging things was to go back to Central America and Mexico, to these lands.

And what I do now is I go back to these places that I crossed when I was eight years old.

I was without my parents, I was skipping the civil war, so for me, part of my healing when I was ready was to confront these spaces, to go back.

So I started going back to these spaces and I started bringing objects from my shrines.

Eventually I started bringing back objects for my sculptures and that's what you're seeing here.

Most of the things here, I brought from Mexico or El Salvador, different parts.

And like, for example, like these avocado wallets that you see here, I got those in Mexico City and there's so many objects that I collect and they become part of my work and it is about retracing my own migration route.

And that's what carries the energy with the work, right?

So I believe that every object has energy and sometimes I find a really cool object that I decide not to use 'cause the energy's off.

I think of animism, how everything has energy, and based on that, I choose the object.

Sometimes I go to these markets and I see millions of objects and I come back with a little toy car and sometimes I go in there and I come out with a truckload of stuff for the work.

But part of the work is... Oh, oh, here is some images.

So the objects that were in the museum collection and for this the museum gave me the freedom to hire a shaman from Mexico to come and cleanse the objects and to talk to the objects.

And she communicated like, yeah, this whole very complicated issue is like, why are these objects in the America Museum?

They should be back in their home country.

So yeah, so it's just a very challenging conversation to have.

Obviously I want them to go back to Central America and Mexico, but who's gonna take care of them when they're there, right?

So even though they were alluded, so it's just like a lot of, presents a lot of issues, but I wish they would be back home where they're from.

So this is the rest of the show here.

And for this, there's a little clip of the video.

(intense music) So for this, I went into a detention center and there were children in the detention center and some of them have been there for two years and their ages from 11 to 18.

And somehow they were just living here, they were caught crossing the border on their own and they were put in these detention centers and they were just waiting for a trial.

And I think a 14-year-old was telling me he was there for two years and they're not allowed to leave.

And I think they have access to a basketball court for an hour a day.

So they had everything really scheduled, like they were in prison.

So I went into the courtyard after we made a mask, we had this mask making workshop to disguise our faces, and went outside and I said, "Okay, let's do this performance."

And I asked them, "What do you do at one o'clock?

"Act it out."

So they're acting it out.

"What are you doing at two o'clock?"

They were acting it out.

And then we did a 24-hour cycle.

So I got an idea of what a 24-hour cycle looks like.

And then I started thinking, "Wow, this child is doing this for two years without seeing his family."

And it's like really heartbreaking.

Yeah, so that was, like, part of the video that I made there and, like, these places are still happening and there's camps full of children that no one talks about.

And yeah, it's really scary how much of these things are out there.

So then a lot of the work also is like going back to talking about retracing my migration route.

I started creating micro economies around the work.

And what I mean by that is literally creating jobs with the museum money or institutional money that I get to fabricate art and I go back to Mexico and El Salvador and I pay them what I would pay my assistant in New York.

I'm not there to save money, I'm there to create an economy and that's part of the work.

So I'm a painter that doesn't paint 'cause I can paint, but I choose not to paint and I choose to hire someone to paint for me so I can pay them.

So there's two painters that I have in Mexico City that make my paintings for me.

And I pretty much, like an example here, I just give them a digital sketch of something and then they paint it and this is how it comes out.

And those are my texts.

So they're pretty much fabricating my work and in return I pay them.

And like, for example, this painter, he has been working with me for years and his wife has brain cancer and he's been using the money that I pay him in order to help from her medical bills.

So again, like, it ties in to trying to create a micro economy to help someone that normally wouldn't have this type of work.

But yeah, at the end, like, I just give him a total digital sketch of what I want, with my text, and he and his father actually paint for me and they fabricate these works.

So when I receive them, I transform them into this other thing, like I make a whole sculpture around them and I put objects and tell my stories about migration, about healing and overcoming all these obstacles.

And these are a series of paintings that I made for my show last, well, this year, in March in New York City and it talks about migration and displacement.

And for this one, talks about like how I had a couple of minutes to say goodbye to everyone in my neighborhood because I was leaving, someone came to pick me up and I was going north to United States.

And I remember all this in detail, so it's part of my work.

This one talks about how, when I finally crossed the border from El Salvador to Honduras, like we pupusas there with our hands and in Honduras they with a fork and knife, and someone saw me eating with my hands and they realized that I was from El Salvador.

And I remember the person saying, "Oh, that kid is probably skipping the war."

And I remember being afraid I was, like, being, like, caught, right?

This one talks about how, when I finally crossed the border into San Diego, San Isidro, I met extended family and they put me in a plane from California to JFK, my parents were.

I remember a flight attendant being so kind and so generous and so loving.

I can imagine her seeing a eight-year-old boy escaping a war, that had been on a two and a half month journey by land.

And she was so loving, so caring, so I made a shrine and a whole painting for her.

And I titled this one "Thank You Flying Magic Woman."

And that was what I titled it.

And this one is also, as soon as I crossed the border, there was all these grandmothers in southern California that took care of me and many other children that were receiving, escaping the war.

And this one in Mexico City, because I spent two months there that I was lost also.

So my connection to Mexico City and the people that are there, is really dear to me.

And this other one to a lady, like a match, and a thank you to a woman that was feeding me and a bunch of other children at a market where we didn't have anything to eat and she was taking, and it was like, thank you to this white dog that you see on the side there, that was protecting us as well.

So that's kind of like what the work, like I talk about all these things, but they're also like, they're challenges, but also I'm giving thanks and I just feel blessed to be in the position that I am now after everything that's happened.

So now we're gonna get into this last project here that I wanna share with you guys, this "Mariposa Relampago," which translates into "Lightning Butterfly," which is a school bus that I turned into a vibrational healing instrument.

So this bus is currently, like right now, it's literally being deinstalled in Austin, Texas, going to Houston.

And here's, like, I made a little trailer of the bus.

Here we go, and I made a film about it.

(intense music) (lively music) (ethereal music) (narrator speaking in foreign language) (intense music) - Yeah, so that's just a little trailer of a 30-minute film that I made and then, oops.

So then I'm gonna show, like, a little film that a museum that funded the whole project made and it's a few minutes long, it's not that long.

My uncle was a student at university that was protesting the war, the civil war that was happening in El Salvador.

He was actually captured, tortured and killed by the military and the rest of his family, which is my family, was considered communist.

So they came after my father, they came after my mother.

They had to escape El Salvador urgently and they left me and my sister to take care of my grandmother.

At the time there was a whole civil war happening.

There were bombs falling, bullets went through our living room, it was really intense.

And my grandmother took us to the countryside until they were able to hire coyotes who were paid to bring us to the United States.

(engine humming) In El Salvador, there's a giant culture of decorating buses.

These buses were actually buses in the United States that, after they exceeded a certain amount of miles, they get sent to South America and they're resold.

In South America and El Salvador, they get transformed into public transportation buses.

So when that happens, they're no longer yellow.

So they paint them and they put a lot of decorations on them.

But also, for me, during the war, I would travel by bus often, and during those times there were so many checkpoints.

So we had to get out of the bus and put our arms over the bus to get checked to make sure we're not carrying any guns.

Even the children were done, like, so...

So the buses, like, symbolize a lot different things for me.

(gong gonging) "Mariposa Relampago's" idea was that I would buy a school bus in El Salvador and have it have the same migratory path that I had when I was eight years old, when I came to this country and I was undocumented, unaccompanied.

And I went from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, all Mexico by land, two and a half months' journey, crossing Tijuana and from San Diego to JFK.

And I started by going to these places just to confront this place as a trauma.

I was walking on the street in Oaxaca when I was thinking of the show, looking for a name, thinking of the name of this bus, and I saw two abuelitas, two, like, elderly ladies in the corner waiting for the light, and they were talking about how there was an ancient healer named Mariposa Relampago when they were little that they remember.

So I wanted to embody that person, that energy of an ancient healer.

So that ancient healer is here and it's the bus.

Part of the practice, after that, over the last several months was to collect objects from Mexico, from those markets, things from El Salvador.

I believe in animism.

Everything has energy.

All these objects carry certain types of energies.

Well, I think there's something like 600 details on the bus.

Nothing is random.

Everything means something to me.

The little boy, it's just like for the displaced children.

There's a carousel on the back of the bus on the top, that's for the ancestors to kind of play while the healing is happening inside of the bus.

Trauma can manifest into different types of illnesses.

For me, it manifested into a cancer.

This is what I talk about when I do ceremonies and workshops with the undocumented community.

We talk about how it's really important to heal those traumas because it can manifest into many different types of illness.

It could be depression, it could be cancer, like for me, it could be so many different things.

So it's really important to understand that we actually have traumas from crossing these borders, but also address them and actually learn the tools.

The power behind it is that it is a vibrational healing instrument when the gongs are activated by sound healers.

So for this exhibition, we're gonna invite people to come and experience not just visually the sculpture, but also go inside of the bus.

And the walls of it vibrate when the gong are activated, the floor vibrates and you not only listen to it, but also feel the vibration of the bus.

(intense music) My story is one of millions of stories from all over the world, of migration and being displaced.

There is different types of healing that happens in everyone's journey.

And I believe that everyone is their own healer.

I believe that you have to do the work yourselves, you just have to learn the tools.

And I'm here to show people the tools.

(intense music) (engine humming) So "Mariposa Relampago," you know, this is really connected to what's currently happening.

I started making "Mariposa Relampago" in Mexico City.

The idea was to buy formerly a school bus from the US that had been sent to Central America.

So the first life of Mariposa, I'm gonna start over, was a yellow school bus in the US moving children around.

Second life, a transportation bus in El Salvador, like the way you saw here, highly decorated.

Third life, a vibrational healing instrument that's gonna be traveling through the US.

So that's where we are now.

So the idea was when I started working with "Mariposa Relampago," this whole thing happened with the border that the governor in Texas was letting all the immigrants in and sending them into, I guess, into sanctuary cities.

And just in New York, I think we received over, I think, like a half a million people from Venezuela that were just sent over there.

And part of the work that I was doing as I'm building "Mariposa," was helping all these people eat and also do healing work.

So I'm receiving them straight from the border.

They're showing up in New York City with shorts in the middle of the winter with, like, little children, right?

And before I could even talk about healings, like, people are hungry, people are cold, there's, like, babies that are cold, right?

So how do we help them?

So a lot of the work that I do is helping them, with the pastor and the infrastructure that we have there.

But we have been extremely overwhelmed because there's too many people coming at once.

So this metaphor of just building a bus that's a healing instrument while people are being bused over to New York City, DC, in Chicago and other cities, it's just like a, yeah, it's like just, I can't even say it's like a coincidence, like how it happened.

And as I'm building "Mariposa," it like... Actually, so basically, the whole idea was the ICA Boston Watershed funded the project, so I went to El Salvador and bought a yellow school bus and I hired a shaman to make sure that it had the proper energy, because so much violence happens in El Salvador.

And then I hired a lawyer to make sure I had the paperwork to cross through borders, 'cause I had to cross Guatemala, Mexico and the United States borders.

And also, I hired a mechanic to make sure I could drive the bus from El Salvador to Mexico, was gonna be transformed.

The engine was taken out and turned into Aboriginal instrument and then brought to the US.

But the lawyer dropped the ball, didn't check the history of this bus, and I found out that I bought a stolen bus from a church and they refused to give me my money back.

So I spent $17,000 of my budget on buying a stolen bus that cannot leave El Salvador.

I cannot sell it because it's a stolen bus.

So I found out that a Chinese company had stolen buses from US, send them to El Salvador, sold them there, and I bought one of those buses.

So this is a situation that I'm in.

And so I'm sitting in Mexico City with my team and so we actually had a really, fortunately, had a really big budget, so I was like, "I'm gonna buy a second bus in Mexico City."

But then the whole concept of the bus was to actually, I wanted to have the same migration path as I did coming from El Salvador to the US.

So I lost that.

So what I did was I was able to hire the shamans, the curanderos, who are in their 80s and 70s.

They're like, you know, they're like really elderly, but they're really powerful.

And I had these tiny little cardboard buses made.

So they pretty much did a ritual inside a volcano in El Salvador.

And then these miniature buses from El Salvador traveled by land to meet the bus in Mexico, and from there they all, the big "Mariposa Relampago" bus and the miniatures, traveled together to United States.

So I was able to complete the migration that I wanted with the blessing of these shamans that were doing the healing work.

And basically this miniature bus became the heart of the bus spiritually.

And yeah, they were completely blessed in this fire ceremony, this ceremony that you have here, that's also part of the film.

And this is the bus before, yeah, when I first bought it, and this is me driving the bus.

I don't know how to drive a bus, but I was driving.

(engine humming) And these are parts of it that I got customized.

I have someone that carves volcanic rock in Mexico and he carves all the rocks for me, again, creating micro economies around the work.

And I was able to hire about 40 people to help me build this bus.

So it was like a giant team effort.

And all these objects, along with over 600 others, are part of the bus.

Some of them are fabricated, some of them are found in markets throughout Mexico and El Salvador.

And these gongs are connected to the I-beams that run in the bottom of the bus, and that's how we make it vibrate.

So if you're inside of the bus and we're playing and we're activating it, you feel the vibration of the walls, of the floor.

And it's something that I learned earlier with the work that I showed you earlier of building those sculptures that people would lay on at MoMA.

But this is just like a larger extension of that.

So a lot of the healing work continues in museum spaces.

But again, just a reminder, on top of this, I'm doing the healing work at the church in other community centers.

So that work still continues.

So I don't really separate myself all healer or artists.

Like, to me, it's like all one thing, like I am Guadalupe and like, I'm doing everything all at once, so it's like, merged.

So every time I have a show I actually do activations.

There's also a lot of cancer ceremonies.

I do ceremonies for the cancer community like all the time and those ceremonies always fill up.

It's like literally for anyone that has cancer or anyone in their families that wants to attend as well, 'cause I really think it's important to provide the care for the family members as well.

So this is the show at the ICA Watershed when "Mariposa" first arrived to the United States from the south.

And just more details, a lot of details on this bus.

And I'm gonna just finish by showing you another video of what it looks like when we activate her with the healers and here's that.

(gong gonging) (intense music) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) (intense music continues) So now with "Mariposa Relampago," it's gonna enter its fourth life.

First, it was the yellow school bus, then a transportation bus in Mexico, a healing instrument like you're seeing here, and in 2026, the plan is to transform "Mariposa" into the interior of a temple in New York city, where I'm gonna be able to do my healing work, the mutual aid, the co-drives, the food drives, working with all marginalized communities and then just responding to whatever this new president throws at us.

So that's the goal coming up.

So I just wanna say thank you to everyone for coming here.

We're gonna do a Q&A.

Anybody feel free to ask questions.

(audience applauding) Thank you.

(audience continue applauding) There's two microphones on the right and the left here if anyone wants to ask questions.

I know some of you guys gotta run to class, but I'm here.

(audience chattering) - Yes?

- I just wanna say, I feel very fortunate that you came today because- - Thank you.

Thank you.

- I mean, just the work that you're doing with frequency and also making jobs to give to your friends and family and other people just to help them out, like these things are things that I find really powerful and, like, I've done my own research into wave frequencies and the healing properties.

- Okay, cool.

- And theta waves, you know, people sleep to this stuff.

Anyway, I just wanna say thank you and also- - No, thank you.

- Like, I would love to learn more about the kind of work that you do because this is stuff that I'm really into.

- Okay.

- I don't know what you do in New York, but you said with your buses, you need help.

I hope to be / I would love to be in New York, this summer I'm graduating from- - Okay, I mean- - I'm a senior.

- If you're in New York, reach out.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- I don't know how I'll find you, but maybe Instagram or something.

- Instagram's a good place to find me, yes.

- Anyway, Guadalupe, thanks so much.

- Thank you for that.

- Yeah.

- Appreciate it.

- Have a nice one.

- Thank you.

Okay, questions.

Oh, okay, good, there's some people questions.

Okay.

Yes, go ahead.

Go ahead.

- Hi, Guadalupe, my name is Anisty and I was just curious because some people could possibly look at your work as, like an alternative medicine and they might not believe in that.

Have you ever had to face those types of challenges before and how do you feel about that and continue your work?

- That's a great question.

You know, a lot of people just...

I always talk about how my sculptures or my work is a Trojan horse to healing.

Like, people visually get a, you know, they see, oh, what is this thing?

And they get connected to it and next thing you know, they come to one of my ceremonies and they just start, like, questioning their spirituality.

It's like, "Why is this sound, this medicine thing Guadalupe is talking about, like, I need to explore meditation or other things or my diet and nutrition," or whatever.

So like ultimately, even like when people bring dogs to the ceremonies, the dogs fall asleep and most dog owners are like, "My super hyper dog falls asleep in your ceremony."

So they start, like, "This is doing something."

- Yeah.

- Right?

And it doesn't matter what language you speak 'cause I'm like, I've been doing all these things in Europe, different languages.

Everyone's feeling the vibration of the instruments, right?

Whether it's the gongs or harmonica or whatever I'm playing, like everyone's feeling the vibration elements and they see the animals respond.

Babies fall asleep in my rituals as well.

So people start, like, "Okay, there's something here."

But I think my hope is to actually, if someone can be inspired to go meditate after seeing my work or to, like, explore spirituality in different ways for their own health, I think that is important because, like, look, we have to deal with our mental health, our spirit and our physical health.

- Yeah.

- Right?

And the world keeps challenge, the older we get, the world keeps throwing more things at us and we have to resist and we have to learn to heal those things immediately so that they don't accumulate.

- Mm.

- So that's part of the work.

But yeah, I don't know if that answers your question, but thank you.

- Thank you so much.

- Okay, so we'll go to this side now.

- Okay.

I really liked learning about your practice.

It connects to me a lot as someone with, unfortunately, pretty frequent occurrence of cancer in my family.

- Okay.

- And I, as, you know, as a student who can make art, I would like to maybe use what I can do just to, you know, make things for the people that I care about.

And I was wondering, what do you consider, like, most important for, like, putting in your art to turn it just from art into art that heals and can give solace and strength to people?

- Yeah, I mean, the main thing is actually like, really...

Okay, so I guess when I was...

The thing is like, you know, I'm way older, so like, I'm in my late 40s now, but when I was a student, I was just trying to figure out what am I doing, right?

So like, I was exploring with sound, I was exploring with sculpture, exploring with painting, photography, so many different things.

And with some of those things I really advanced, but not all mediums.

But the more time I spend in the studio, I would say, like, advice to students here that are artists, you spend thousands of hours in the studio and just become obsessed and just like, trial and error, trial and error, trial and error.

And you keep kind of learning, learning, learning, but also, like, there's the studio work, but there's also the human work, right?

If you can give back to a community that is struggling, like, as a volunteer.

'cause maybe as a student, I didn't have any money, but I would volunteer and help, like, some organization and then just be really involved in helping the elderly or a cancer group or whatever.

Like, I think, like, you'll start realizing how, oh, I'm making paintings about this, but I'm also helping this community.

And you start merging it together.

And ultimately, the most important thing for you guys that are in school is your mental health right now.

Because, like, the world, it's in a crisis mode.

So it's like really important to do that self-care and that self-love.

Sometimes sitting in the park, when you're the most stressed, for 20 minutes, go for it.

I taught for nine years.

You guys shouldn't, like, please make time in your schedule.

And I know you guys are crammed with work and all these things in school, but it's really important to squeeze in every day, like 15 minutes just to sit and get in the sun, right?

Or just like, go to sit in front of the lake or talk to your best friend on the phone for 20 minutes, right?

Or even, sound is medicine.

Play your favorite songs for 20 minutes.

And then also, like when I'm done, I put my favorite music and it brings me happiness, right?

So sound is medicine.

You can sit in the park and listen to the birds and the trees moving.

Sound is medicine, right?

It's free, right?

Listen to your favorite song, sound is medicine.

So doing those little things for yourself is important because life is challenging for some of us.

But thank you, thank you for sharing.

- Thank you so much.

- Okay, so we'll go here.

- Okay.

My name's Nyla, and as a fellow Latina artist, I'm just wondering what your advice is on how to use art to cope with just the current situation in the past.

- Yeah, no, no, totally., So yeah, like, it's like really, I think similar to what I was saying, like, it's like there's very little we can do to, like, save the world and some of us can do more than others.

But you guys are students, when you're young it's like, really the most important thing is to try to, like, stay balanced with your mental health.

Whatever it is that you can do, it's not a daily, right?

It's like whatever you do today, take it into tomorrow.

And if we have a bad day, it's okay to mourn, but you have to do the work to kind of get out of it, 'cause then it just stays in you for too long, right?

And then it starts to affect your daily, yeah, like everything that you do.

But you know what?

Like, if you can do it, if your body can do it, go get a pint of ice cream tonight and make yourself feel better.

And I'm about nutrition, but if that happens or whatever it is you gotta do to make yourself feel better for that one day you're struggling, go do it.

Like, indulge, right?

So again, I don't eat sugar.

Someone tells you that, like, I eat zero sugar, 'cause I think that's very problematic, but whatever it is you gotta do.

And again, if you can volunteer to help an organization, sometimes we're like, "Okay, this situation is bad for us," but it's also people that are worse than us, right?

And how can we help them?

So that's like, you know, like when I think the world is so bad for me and then I go to the church and I help the cancer community, undocumented community, it's like, "Well, my life is not bad, you know?"

And then it's like, "Okay, I can help them."

So that's my advice, like, take care of yourself first before you can see if you can help others.

But I think that really helps, that self-love and that self-care.

So thank you.

- Thank you.

- Okay.

Hi.

- Hola.

Well, first, (audience member speaking in foreign language) - Ah, gracias.

(audience member speaking in foreign language) - Okay.

Okay.

So (speaking in foreign language) I speak both languages too, just that everyone understand, but like, you know, like it took me a while to be (speaking in foreign language), it just took me a long time to find the courage to talk about my issues and my challenges.

But the symbols are my life, you know, like questioning what symbols I use, like that's my life, (speaking in foreign language).

So like everything that you like, everything in your room, everything in your family, your history, that's part of your symbols.

You know what I mean?

So it's like, that's how I started seeing it.

So those 700 objects on the bus, I connect with all those objects in one way.

Like, I had little sliver spoons, (Guadalupe speaking in foreign language) and that represents community healing and us healing together, eating together.

So symbols of like, (speaking in foreign language) community eating, like, community eating is like all the symbols, the forks and knives, the spoons, that's community eating.

So that's why the spoons made it to the bus.

So that's how you find your symbols.

It's just very simple.

Say what is your life, what do you like to do?

What do you surround yourself with?

Those are the symbols for you.

- Would you say that's how you found, like, the people that do everything, like, that you do?

- Yeah, like my team you mean?

(audience member speaking in foreign language) - Yeah, like the team, you know, like the team.

Just like I have conversations with people, you know, I go to the market and someone starts talking to me and they're just like, "Oh, what do you do?

What do you do?"

And it's like, "Oh, I carve stones."

It's like, "Do you want a job?"

You know?

Or like, I'm walking around and it's like this...

I'm like literally the laundromat and someone is sitting next to me and next thing you know, they're talking to me that they do healing work.

And I'm like, "Do you want to go on tour with me?"

So they just come to you.

You know, I just put my antennas out there that I'm just like, I'm here to receive and to meet people and to absorb energies and people show up.

So it's like the team, it's like the symbols, it's like finding everything, you know, but it's like, really, I'm open to change.

I'm gonna transform that bus into a temple now.

I love that bus, but that's the next step.

You know, it's just needed and that's where we're gonna go.

But anyway, yeah, so hopefully that answers your question, but thank you.

- Thank you.

- Gracias.

Okay.

- Hi, there.

- Hi.

I think you touched a lot of students, I am not one of them.

- Oh, okay.

- I wanna know what happened to your mother and father.

- Well, unfortunately, my mother passed away from cancer.

- I'm sorry.

- 17 years ago, right?

And my father lives in New Jersey, And yeah, and he's undocumented.

- How old were you when you were re-united with them?

- I was eight.

- So you were still eight.

- Yeah, I was a little kid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, so... And again, like, I'd say my story is one of millions, there's kids being reunited with their parents like right now in this country.

So that's still happening.

Yeah.

- Well, good luck to you.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

- Touched a lot of people.

- Yeah, hi.

- Hi.

Oh.

I was just wondering, I guess, what your most memorable experience has been throughout your, like, healing and creating process, whether that was through teaching or kind of like hiring the people who are surrounding you?

- Yeah, no, that's a good question because there... And you know, most of the experiences have been during the ceremonies.

I think that, I have to be honest, like one of the ceremonies, a cancer ceremony that I did, and 400 people with cancer showed up, and I remember I was working with the Tibetan throat singer, and he had never done a cancer ceremony before.

And there was, I think, I'm sorry, this ceremony had 200 people at San Francisco MoMA.

And I remember going in there and everyone's crying.

'cause, I don't know, they were going through cancer and they were being challenged.

And I was like, "Okay, I have to figure out how to bring them back."

And so I think, like for me, it's like I'm in this position that I'm just trying to give people a ray of hope, some light for the day to go on to the next day, because I went through cancer myself, so I understand.

When I had cancer, I was looking for a ray of hope just to get through the day, some inspiration just to survive to the next day.

So if I can provide that, can my work provide that for people, I feel like I'm so blessed, you know?

So these ceremonies, all of them are touching, but particularly when there's, like, a crisis happening, and especially the cancer ones, you know, I have such a deep root to that, and I love all those people.

And actually, invented my own meditation that I did when I had cancer.

And that teaches meditation, cancer meditation, and basically, this cancer meditation, I talk about how the tumor is a crying baby.

And with a crying baby, you actually, you give it love and care and affection.

And that's what you have to do with the cancer on the spiritual level.

Let the radiation, the chemo, burn it and destroy it.

But this is part of my body, right?

I have to give it love and care and affection and then tell it slowly disappear, slowly shrink, slowly go away.

And eventually it's gonna be gone.

And that's like, at least the spiritual side of the cancer, right?

Then there's a whole physical thing of it, like the doctors and them take care of that, right?

A lot of times with cancer, like, it reoccurs for a lot of people because they didn't do the spiritual work to cleanse themselves from it.

A lot of Indigenous cultures believe that you need to heal the body spiritually along with the physical body.

So they always did spiritual work on the body, whatever illness, right?

So every illness can be applied.

So this meditation can be used for anything.

This can be used for depression, this can be used for any illness, and say, "I'm struggling right now with this."

And as opposed to like, oh, getting frustrated with it, give it love and affection and care, and slowly tell it to calm down and to go away.

And that's a good way to... And this is a meditation that I teach, which is, those moments are, like, precious to me and so important because I'm able to share what I've learned with people.

So to answer your question, like super long answer, but yeah, it is about those intimate moments that I'm actually helping people right now.

So those are the, you know, those are the moments.

But thank you for that question.

- [Audience Member] Thank you.

- Hi.

- Hi, thank you so much for coming to Ann Arbor and thank you everyone, like Robbie and Chrisstina, like, for hosting you at this very particular moment.

I think it's very meaningful, especially at this moment, like of- - Yeah.

- Of the time where we need really like some healings and, you know, some courage for ourselves.

My name is Okeyong, MFA student here at Stamps, and I was born and raised in South Korea and moved to United States.

So I think, like, it was really cool to hear your stories and also like your kind of, like, ideas on this installation.

And then I was wondering first, like your ideas or purchase to spaces, because I can see many different spaces you kind of like, you know, install and exhibit and perform your work.

Like, for example, like there was like a park, there was a community center, there was a, like, church, also, it has a museum.

So I wonder, like, how you approach differently to those spaces?

Especially like this, I guess, there would be a different approach that you take in terms of, like when you approach to this museum setting and also, like, this community oriented spaces.

Like, I want to hear more about this.

- Yeah, so, you know, like just last month, or actually a couple weeks ago, I toured nine cities in, I mean, nine cities in six weeks.

And I had a show, a big show in the south, in Leon, in France, and in Scotland and a bunch of other places, and all those places were all different, right?

They all presented different challenges.

And I don't speak any French, and I'm doing ceremonies where a large, like, people with cancer in France, right?

And like, just like letting the work... You know, first I do the installations, so I create my own energy in the space with the objects, with the murals or whatever I'm doing.

And then I literally do a private ceremony to cleanse the space 'cause I don't know what it was.

I know a little bit of the history, but I don't know what, you know, so I cleanse the space and then I'm be able to invite people for the ceremony.

So there's all these steps.

At the church in Brooklyn, I'm actually doing a ceremony on Saturday.

To me, it's like an urgent response to the election because the community is really struggling over there.

But at the church, I've done hundreds of ceremonies there, so that already has my energy there.

And plus the pastor, he does his service there as well.

So like, I can just activate that.

I can just show up with my gongs and just start playing.

It feels like it's ready for this kind of thing.

But that's the thing, it's like, really, like all of them present different things and challenges, but ultimately it's like, how do I communicate with people that speak different languages and have different cultures?

Even like going to Brazil, I've been to Korea to the Gwangju Biennale and I did stuff there.

So it's like, every place is different, but ultimately it's about, we're all humans and it's really beautiful how like, at the end, everyone's connected and everyone's the same, you know, no matter what, even if you don't understand what I'm saying, like you feel the energy from the instruments and the ceremonies.

So it's less about the space, but also just making sure that the people show up so I can do the work.

So that's been the key here.

- Yeah, I see.

Yeah, I remember I saw your work in Gwangju Biennale- - Oh, you saw it, okay?

- Yeah.

- Oh, cool.

- And then, at the moment, like, unfortunately there was no performance, so like my friends and me kind of like, you know, saw this work and then like, "Oh, it's more like, kind of like sculptural object installation."

But like, it was really cool to see the video, but like, I would just wonder, like, what's your ideal ways of appreciation of this work?

Like, do you expect audience to play with the installation?

- No, no.

I have a whole team of healers that travels me.

They're the only ones that can activate.

We're the only ones that can activate.

Because to be honest, there's a lot of responsibility in doing the ceremonies because there's, you know, the healers need to do all the healing work on themselves before they go try to heal anyone else.

- [Okeyong] Mm, okay.

- So, I mean, I think that's why it's important.

- [Okeyong] Okay.

- But Gwangju is one of those rare places that I had a show and I didn't get to activate it.

So for me, it's important to put up the show, but to do the ceremonies and do the, you know, connection with people that are there.

And that's one of the places that I...

The curators didn't, they couldn't, for some reason they didn't want to do it, so it didn't work.

But mostly I do want activations to happen, for sure.

- Yeah.

- The more the better.

- Mm, okay.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, thank you so much.

- Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

- Hi.

- Hi.

Thank you so much for your presence and your practice.

- Thank you.

- I had a similar question about the spaces.

- Okay.

- But thank you for answering that, so I'm gonna ask something else.

- Yeah.

- I'm wondering about your sculptural work specifically, like with the retablos, like how you choose to activate them with sculpture rather than having them by themselves.

If you could talk more about that.

- Yeah, I mean, so like the, you know, like the paintings, the retablos, they keep expanding.

At first it was just like a tiny little border, the frame that I made for them.

Next thing you know, like they're bigger than me now.

Right?

Because I feel like I need to put more symbols on them.

And the new ones have tons of little objects on them because I guess, I get to expand my language and say more things with the objects that I'm bringing in.

And different objects have different energies into it.

So like, that's the reason why I choose not to just show the painting because I wanted to, again, finding a little toy truck in middle Central America that is used, and putting that in a sculpture automatically shifts the energy of what you're seeing, you know?

So that's why they have, like, pretty much turn them into, there's a shrine in there with objects with particular energy that are part of it.

So that explains it.

- Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

Hi, thank you for waiting too, so long for the question.

Thank you.

- Yeah, it's fine.

I was also gonna say thank you so much for coming in.

I had a question as soon as you showed the items.

I don't know that much about South America, but with... And I think you might've half answered it.

Do you normally do the secondhand or like kind of used items in your sculptures?

Because you said you went through markets and I don't know if South America usually has like, the secondhand stuff in the markets or not.

- Yeah, yeah.

So like, usually like most of the things that I have are secondhand unless I'm getting something fabricated, right?

So that's almost like a brand new object we made.

But yeah, things are usually found in the markets of Latin America, because Latin America's full, I mean, all over the world actually, I was just in France and I found this market, they do the same thing.

So like these second-hand markets where people were trying to like, make extra money and they're selling, like, their own belongings or a collection of things that they got.

So that's like happening actually all over the world.

The more I travel, I see these markets everywhere and that's where I get the objects that become part of the work.

But yeah, so it's, again, it's about finding the objects with particular energy that I want the works to carry.

- Yeah, 'cause I know you're talking about animus and that's why I assumed like a lot of it was secondhand because- - Yeah, most of it.

- If something's new, then it doesn't really- - No.

- I didn't know- - I don't think I used any new objects to think about it.

Like even the bus has been gone through several lives.

So yeah, thank you.

- Yeah, of course, thank you, - Guadalupe.

You're really generative here.

We're getting more people in line.

I could see this could go on a long time.

We do have the real time thing that we have to clear this theater in a few minutes.

- Okay, so I'll answer a few more.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- So like, maybe two more questions or everybody can go super quick.

- Let's do a quick ones, go ahead.

- I just have a quick question.

So what were the structures, how were they attached and like the foundation of each individual artwork?

- Oh, so I believe everything that you see here is really sound, like either has wood or metal and it's welded or screwed together.

And then I put layers on it.

But I believe like everything's really strong and really well made.

Really sound as a sculpture.

- [Audience Member] And would your team weld and screw them together?

- No, I do all that.

- All of it, okay, okay.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Thank you.

- Okay, yeah, just go here.

- [Jake] Hi, I'm Jake, nice to meet you.

You spoke briefly about learning about a lot of other cultures on spirituality, and I wanted to know about how spirituality affects you as an artist and if you're ever inspired by dreams you have and how the significance of dreams in your art and spirituality?

- Less so than dreams.

When I meditate, I get a lot of visions and a lot of those meditations inform everything in my practice.

And sometimes dreams do too, yeah.

So again, I'm a sponge receiving information from everywhere.

Yeah, thank you.

- Cool.

- Okay.

- [Audience Member] Thank you so much for your practice.

- Thank you.

- And I apologize, I'm a little late, so if you've already answered this, feel free to skip over it.

But I'm a MFA student at Cranbrook.

and there's been a lot of conversations about the amount of research that goes into making a piece that's so dimensional.

And there's always this, you know, there's so much lore about each object that you're putting in installation and you've been incredibly generous with conversations with people and I'm sure curatorial statements.

But I wonder where you see some of that research coming through in a different way, maybe in the future, or like what other medias that you're looking at to present that?

- Yeah, I mean, honestly the research is very simple.

I just choose what my life teaches me, what surround me, what I like, what I'm surrounded with.

So, I mean, if you're looking for material things, what do you enjoy?

What's in your room?

What's in your past?

What is in your family home or whatever?

Like these things are the language, no matter what it is, so.

- [Audience Member] And do you feel like your installations, like a viewer coming in, are they gonna understand every object in the room and- - No.

- Do you see- - Only if I sat there and explained it all.

But there's 700 objects on the bus, so it's okay.

As long as I get what they are.

- [Audience Member] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- But a lot of it's documented.

So I'm gonna take one last question.

Hi.

(audience member speaking in foreign language) - Like, how do you learn to use those symbols and the information to, like, activate it but actually do the healing, you know what I mean?

- Well, so objects that I choose have a particular energy and I said before, like sometimes I find a really beautiful object.

And it's like, "This has really weird energy.

I'm not using that," you know, so I don't put it in the work.

But the healing work, what happens with sound, so my instruments, I'm very careful about how I choose my instruments as well.

Because that's where the healing work comes in, they're the ones that open up the portals.

So I do a lot of different instruments, not just the gongs, like so many different things that I do.

- If I'm trying to find like my way, like what is some advice or like- - Like an instrument, you mean?

(audience member speaking in foreign language) - Oh, okay, so just figure out, make a list of what is healing to you and figure out what that is.

You could be a nutritionist, you can teach meditation, you can teach, you can be a therapist, you can do so many different things.

So how do you, I mean, this is a question for you to take home.

It's like, are you a caregiver?

How are you gonna give back?

What communities do you want to work with?

It's number one.

What is your community you want to help?

How do you want to work with them?

And then what can you provide to them?

And sometimes, literally doing healing work is putting some hours as a volunteer to help people eat, you know, and you can start there.

And the more you talk to people, the more we start opening up this world because we need as many volunteers as possible to help all these communities.

So what is your community first, find out what that community is and then from there, figure out what's needed and then learn that healing method or whatever it is.

But yeah, like being a nutritionist is being a healer, being a therapist is the healer, right?

Teaching people meditation is a healer, but you gotta do your own work first before you get to do that work.

But thank you for that question.

And thank you everyone for sticking around.

(audience applauding) Appreciate it.

Thank you.

(audience chattering)