OATH OF THE BROKEN TONGUES

The 24th Bienal de Arte Paiz, 2026
The National Museum of Guatemalan Art, Antigua, Guatemala

OATH OF THE BROKEN TONGUES stages an imagined oath by a Modern Spanish Coloniser addressing a newly colonised nation. The performance explores the fracture of language under colonial domination, where speech becomes both an instrument of power and a site of resistance.

Set within a context shaped by Spanish colonial rule, faint fragments of Spanish marching music and patriotic compositions create an unstable historical echo. The performer occupies two unequal voices: one does not speak Spanish but is forced to read colonial Spanish texts through phonetics, stumbling through an imposed linguistic regime; the other speaks in gibberish—an invented counter-language born from rupture, refusal, and ancestral memory.

Their encounter becomes a collision between legibility and unreadability, authority and refusal. Breath, hesitation, mispronunciation, and broken phonetics expose linguistic violence, while gibberish emerges as a fluid, unowned tongue that refuses translation.

The work becomes an anti-oath—a refusal to submit to the authority of an inherited tongue, reclaiming the possibility of speaking otherwise through rupture, mispronunciation, and the radical poetics of the unreadable.