Manuel Tzoc: Performance Art as Indigenous and Cuir Poetic Repair

Guatemalan artist Manuel Tzoc uses performance to explore Indigenous and cuir experiences, centering communal and ancestral processes over individual authorship. In a December 2025 interview in Guatemala City, he described his work as integrating delirium, reverie, and lucidity to oppose heteropatriarchal and racist narratives. His early performances include Piel (2016), performed before the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura in Guatemala City—a site implicated in genocides against Maya populations—where he wore a garment made from fabric used by his mother Micaela Bucup. In Memoria en blanco (2016), presented at Proyecto Poporopo gallery, he invited his father Gerónimo Ricardo Tzoc Puac to revisit painful memories. La refundación de Abya Yala (2016), created with Rodrigo Arenas-Cartes in Guatemala and Chile, stages an encounter grounded in K’iche’ and Mapuche experiences, reconfiguring the cartography of Abya Yala. Moler el olvido / Amasar la sangre (2021) uses a maize-grinding board and stone roller, reclaiming the artist's surname from the K’iche’ verb tzok'ï'k’. Desatando a Gucumatz (2024) gathers woven belts from women in his family, forming an umbilical cord-like piece. Tzoc's practice, which began in written poetry, now uses performance to articulate what has not been historically assimilated, particularly Indigenous and cuir experiences.