Whispers from Tides and Forests
Group show featuring Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
Apr 11th – Jul 13th, 2025
Kunsthaus Baselland, Münchenstein / Basel
This is an exhibition of quiet tones as well as the delicate new stories that we should begin telling in these times of crisis and upheaval. In the face of climate change, landscapes, forests and rivers under threat, and the mass migration caused by the extreme global climatic and political situations that are becoming increasingly apparent, we need to find new narratives that might not be the same as the previous ones. Because, as the professor and anthropologist Anna Tsing recently explained, we should now prepare ourselves to survive without the old stories that could tell us what happens next.
The internationally active artists involved in the exhibition facilitate these subtle new narratives that position human beings in a new relationship between space, time and body. They are about a caring, considerate coexistence between people and nature, but also progress and the power of resilience—without dismissing current events. They offer us a glimpse of the world, from South America to Europe, showing us turbulent places and themes of vulnerability and loss, but also trees, forest floors and their mushroom cultures, rivers and landscapes full of beauty, poetry and the future.
Curator: Ines Goldbach
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s complex oeuvre, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, and video, often traces stories of loss, melancholy, violence, and colonial exploitation that are in danger of being forgotten, without losing the poetry of the images he creates. The artist often invokes personal and collective memories and narratives from Guatemala, including the stories of family members who were killed during the civil war between the military government and the rebels over unfair land distribution (1960–1996) in Guatemala. The artist himself was born in Guatemala City during these years of war in 1978 and moved to Canada at the age of six.
With the work Esquisúchil, Ramírez-Figueroa refers to the popular name of the tree Bourreria huanita, an endangered species in Guatemala that is closely associated with Saint Pedro de San José de Betancur (Saint Peter of Saint Joseph de Betancur). Hermano (Brother) Pedro, as he is also known, was the founder of the Order of Bethlehemite Brothers and strategically planted the tree in the courtyards of churches in Guatemala to attract and convert the Indigenous population. The Spaniards observed that the tree was revered by the locals and used as a source of homeopathic medicine. After the saint’s death, the veneration of the tree, which was said to have miraculous properties, merged with that of Pedro, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002. The veneration of and belief in the esquisúchil tree can be considered the most open form of local tree worship today. The video work Mimesis of Mimesis takes a similar thematic direction. The performance shown here took place at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, one of the institutes founded during the Dutch colonial era. With a slow tracking shot and only the sound of a crackling fire in the fireplace, the viewer is led through rooms, past seating such as chairs and armchairs with their cushions removed. The naked body of the artist appears in the center of the image, lying on several layers of the removed cushions, apparently asleep, with his eyes closed. Placed all over his body are small upholstery buttons, as if the body itself, fused with the layers of upholstery beneath it, were a kind of Chesterfield sofa. On the one hand, this performative gesture alludes to art historical references; on the other hand, it becomes an absurd and simultaneously perfidious critique of colonialism made human: lying on top of the lives of others, wrenching away their culture and traditions, and exposing them, naked and defenseless, to violence against their will.
