Desde el estrecho dudoso
(From the Doubtful Isthmus)
Contemporary Video Art from Central America
Curated by Juan Canela.
Desde el Estrecho Dudoso (From the Doubtful Isthmus) begins with an intuition: that the Central American isthmus is not only a territory, but also a way of seeing. Drawing on the notion reclaimed by curator Virginia Pérez-Ratton, this program brings together contemporary video works that embrace uncertainty not as a limitation, but as a space of relation. Moving through memory, bodies, landscapes, and archives, these works do not seek to define Central America; rather, they think and imagine from it. Like the currents that traverse the isthmus, they remain open to movement, encounter, and transformation.
The video-works in this program traverse this shifting geography through the moving image. Moving between archive and fiction, observation and imagination, body and landscape, they explore different ways of inhabiting and thinking from the isthmu. Rather than offering a representation of Central America, Desde el Estrecho Dudoso invites viewers to enter a territory where images, like currents, are always in motion.
Program:
Extra Galería, Guatemala
Gabriel Rodriguez Pellecer (Guatemala City, 1984; Lives and works in Guatemala City)
Ruta a la inmortalidad (The Route to Immortality), 2024
Video monocanal
12:14 min
Ruta a la inmortalidad is a project that takes the myth of modernity as an interpellation through the case of the Panama Canal. Drawing on archival news material circulated by British and American media throughout the 20th century, the video examines the Monroe Doctrine and Cold War political discourses in order to unpack the rhetoric of progress and development behind interventions in Latin American countries.
Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer considers his body as a somatic canvas in which diverse phenomena and energies can manifest. Due to tectonic, volcanic, organic, political, and geological processes, the earth provides energy. He regards myths and storytelling as “technologies” that can be used to rewrite identities and is interested in challenging the ways in which Western thought invades other cosmogonies through his artistic, curatorial, research, and teaching practices.
SatisFactory, Costa Rica
Mimian Hsu (Costa Rica, 1980)
Paisaje Simpoiético, 2026
Single-Channel video. 4:18
En las relaciones simbióticas y las estrategias naturales para sobrevivir encontré paralelismos y metáforas relacionados con la experiencia diaspórica de mi familia. Me llamó la atención la simplicidad con la que Haraway describe el término, que esencialmente significa hacer-con. Propuesto por M. Beth Dempster en 1998, en estudios ambientales, se refiere a sistemas creados colectivamente sin límites espaciales o temporales definidos. En Paisaje Simpoiético, tomo prestada esta idea del hacer-con, relacionarse-con, generar-con, ser-con y pensar-con para encontrar el sentido de pertenencia que he buscado toda mi vida. No busca necesariamente responder a preguntas sobre qué significa ser asiática centroamericana ni sobre cómo pertenezco a un lugar específico, sino abrirme a formar parte de un ecosistema más amplio. Lograr convertirme en un ser que forma parte de un ensamblaje más grande que yo misma: intentar respirar, permanecer y coexistir con mi entorno, sin delimitar los linderos que determinan cada unidad por separado.
La pieza es simple: mi deseo es integrarme en el bosque nuboso de San Gerardo de Dota. Para lograrlo, he creado una capa que me permite estar dentro –de-con– este paisaje y satisfacer un anhelo: pertenecer.
Matia Borgonovo, El Salvador
Gabriela Novoa (1991, El Salvador. Lives and works in El Salvador)
THE IRAZU SWEETS RECIPE, (DISARGING) A BODY WITH SWEETNESS, 2025
Hybrid documentary video
Directed and written by Gabriela Novoa. Photography by Paula Rivera and Isabel Imery. Edited by Karen Sibrian.
10:00 min in full HD format.
Video about the sweets recipe of “Papa Chava”, my great-grandfather. This video is a gesture to remember him through the hands of my mother as she attempts to recreate his
sweets recipe. He was the only man in my family spoken of with tenderness, and to speak of him is to speak of a patriarchal system from which he himself fled, of the fantasy of deconstructing masculinity within a patriarchal system that makes affection and care impossible.
LL proyectos, Honduras
Leonardo González (Tegucigalpa, 1982)
Life is Sweeter than it Seems, 2024
5:59 minutos
“Life is Sweeter than it Seems” o “La vida es más dulce de lo que parece”es un videoarte que confronta la cruda realidad de la crisis de los niños migrantes centroamericanos. Año tras año, miles de niños huyen de forma masiva hacia los Estados Unidos, escapando de la pobreza extrema, la violencia del narcotráfico, la explotación y las maras. Aquellos que logran cruzar la frontera suelen enfrentarse al confinamiento en centros de detención inhumanos, tristemente conocidos como «las perreras».
Utilizando los icónicos dulces M&M’s como una amarga metáfora, la obra traza una línea de explotación: el cacao con el que se elaboran es producido en Centroamérica y cosechado por manos infantiles. Adquirí estos dulces en la tienda de Times Square en Nueva York —epítome del consumo y el capitalismo— y luego imprimi sobre ellos nombres de niños que murieron en el trayecto, así como los hitos geográficos de su travesía fatal: “La Bestia” o (el tren de la muerte), el “Desierto de Arizona” o el “Río Bravo”. Bajo el brillo de los dulces yde la opulencia comercial, se escribe el dolor silencioso del éxodo.
Arteconsult, Panamá
Andrea Santos (Panama, 1991; lives and works in Panama)
Danza de la lluvia con sol (Melancolía tropical) / (Dance of rain with sun) (Tropical melancholy), 2026
Single-channel video, 8’35”
Video SD 16:9
“It’s raining while the sun shines, there’s an old woman in love!” This saying, common in the Caribbean and Latin America, reflects on the unpredictable as an event that gives rise to mystery. Whether it’s a witch or an old woman getting married, combing her hair, or dancing, this extraordinary phenomenon is a moment where a collective memory of the mystical is embodied from this spontaneous contradiction we see in the atmosphere: raindrops falling, even under a blue and sunny sky. Rain with Sun” or Tropical Depression attempt to represent this contradictory and unpredictable essence of the saying, of the land, and of the expression of an identity in constant transformation. The title also plays on the emotional ambiguity of the weather: depression as a meteorological phenomenon and as a state of mind, charged with a tropical melancholy that permeates bodies and landscapes.
This video proposes inhabiting contradiction as a form of knowledge, recognizing in the magical, the affective, and the intuitive, other ways of imagining identity, territory, and belonging. In a world permeated by rationality and speed, rain with sun becomes a portal: a suspended instant where the improbable reveals what’s true.
