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OS Invoco: the Guatemala of Giuseppe Laera

They taught fear,

they came to make the flowers wither.

For their flower to live

they spoiled and sucked our flower.

Castrate the sun!

That's what the Dzule came here to do.

"The reverse of the Conquest Aztec, Mayan and Inca testimonies" by Miguel Lèon-Portilla.

Guatemala is a land of stratified wounds and complex inner geographies, where spirituality is not mere contemplation, but an act of fierce cultural resistance. In his work, Giuseppe Laera crosses this human landscape, exploring the invisible boundaries between urban and ancestral reality, documenting a dimension "marked by wars and invasions, in which the sacred manifests itself through syncretism and cultural reappropriations".

Laera's goal is not limited to recording the surface of everyday life, but digs into the reconfiguration of colonial models. Through images of clear formal rigor and acute documentary sensitivity, the project restores the complexity of a nation in which the ancient Mayan culture became inextricably linked to the Catholic faith. In the squares of Chichicastenango or during processions, The author's lens captures the density of a hybrid rituality, a "tailor-made religion" that appropriates public space and challenges the rigidity of Western dogmas.

The visual fulcrum of the investigation moves around surprising icons that become "a metaphor for a spirituality not recognized by the Church but deeply rooted in the community". Laera fragments and recomposes the visual space, showing the coexistence between the solemnity of the celebrations – recently recognized by UNESCO – and the intimate drive of a population that, today as then, remains "very attached to cosmology and myths". His images thus become a critical and profound mirror: a visual essay in which the contemporary and the archaic overlap, revealing the persistence of a people who continue to evoke the ancient gods to inhabit the present.

Sonia Pampuri