The Entanglement of Migration, Indigenous Peoples, and Colonialism

Porosidad Intuitiva is the title of his 2024 exhibition at the daadgalerie in Berlin, Germany, where he presented The Silk Road (2017) alongside Paisajes mentales de bambú (2024). Concurrently, his work The Practical Guide to Gardening was on view at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in the same city. With a poetics grounded in materiality and a subtle use of humor as a tool to pierce through density and question essentialist definitions of identity, Alarcón Lam disrupts essentialist notions of mestizaje. He dwells in the liminal, oscillating between imposed categories. He acknowledges and values the history and the Indigenous peoples of the territory he inhabits, speaking from a place that unsettles the dominant white gaze.

The Silk Road
In 1921, to mark the centenary of Guatemala’s independence, the Chinese community in Guatemala gifted the Guatemalan people a Chinese arch, which was erected in the Central Plaza of Guatemala City, where the National Palace of Culture now stands. Just six years later, dictator Jorge Ubico ordered the arch’s demolition – unlike other monuments, it was not relocated but erased. In La Ruta de la Seda, Alarcón Lam reconstructs the outline of the arch using second-hand clothing, imported from the United States but manufactured in Asia. He arranges the garments directly on the plaza floor, where passerby slowly dismantle the structure by picking up the clothes. As the fabric arch dissolves, the gesture is documented in a video featuring aerial shots and public interaction within the urban space. With this action, Alarcón Lam symbolically reactivates the multiple layers of historical memory, where the Chinese diaspora, local Indigenous communities, and the colonial logic that still underpins many contemporary transnational relationships are all intertwined.

Alarcón Lam’s piece not only makes visible the structural erasure of racialized bodies but also embodies a spirit of disobedience against the expectations of “good behavior” imposed on Chinese migrants. It revives lesser-known memories of rebellious and defiant figures within that diaspora. This history, far from being an isolated case, is interwoven with other forms of resistance that, across different territories and bodies, have confronted colonial mechanisms. Within this network, the sustained struggle of the country’s Indigenous peoples – the Xinca, the Garífuna, and the Maya – also resonate, as their persistence has shaped one of the most powerful forms of opposition to the coloniality that still structures the nation.

Bamboo and Territory
Floyd McClure was a U.S. botanist who lived in Canton, China, where he studied the bamboo plant. In Paisajes mentales de bambú, presented at the daadgalerie, Esvin explores the historical and contextual dimensions of bamboo in relation to the Central American territory, drawing connections between McClure’s research and the history of the United Fruit Company. Alarcón Lam investigates the strategies used by the West to extract and relocate resources from various regions- plants, seeds, knowledge – in order to build a model of production in which the racialized body is rendered cheap labor. Asian fruits were introduced into lands previously seized from Indigenous communities, who – alongside Chinese migrants – were then made to work the land.

The photographic series exhibited at Künstlerhaus Bethanien presents a hair transplant performed on the artist’s scalp, establishing a symbolic intersection between Esvin’s diasporic experience and the history of monocultures as an extension of a colonial mindset geared toward uniformity. The images reveal inflammation in the transplanted area – a metaphor for a territory affected by a foreign species, an artificial insertion. It is a self-portrait shaped by the allegorical relationship between plant and hair. By ironically staging his own dissident diasporic body, the artist exposes the absurdity of extractivism and its entwined practices of territorial dispossession and resource extraction.

Trajectories
The entangled trajectories of bamboo, bananas, and Chinese migration reveal a shared, non-linear history that manifests intuitively in the work of Esvin Alarcón Lam. In the logos of overseas Chinese communities, the ship always points toward the homeland, suggesting an eventual return. While part of this migration settled in the Americas, many returned, and others continued their journey to different countries. Even when settling in places like the United States or Guatemala, a deep bond with the land of origin endures a persistent connection to ancestral territory.

Esvin Alarcón Lam (Guatemala, 1988) works with sculpture, installation, video, and other media. His work explores migration, memory, and displacement from a queer perspective. He draws inspiration from his family history as part of the Chinese diaspora in Central America.

Esteban Pérez (Quito, 1992) is an artist based in Berlin. His work explores alternative modes of attention for relating to the more-than-human world and landscape.

Translation: Jess Oliveira