Regina José Galindo’s Tierra begins with a visual proposition that is almost too plain to evade: a person stands in a field while an excavator cuts away the ground around her. The 2013 video does not ask the viewer to imagine distance from its subject. The machine keeps working. The soil becomes a boundary. The artist’s body remains on the small parcel left beneath her feet.
MoMA describes the work as a connection among the exploitation of labor, resources and human life in Guatemala. That formulation is crucial because Tierra does not turn land into a poetic backdrop. Land is where extraction happens; it is also where the record of violence can be concealed and later uncovered. MoMA connects the machine-dug ditch to mass graves from the Guatemalan Civil War and to the massacre of Indigenous people, especially Maya Ixil communities. The work’s pressure comes from holding these facts together instead of allowing the viewer to treat one as metaphor for the other.
Galindo’s project page frames the video through testimony heard in Guatemala’s 2013 genocide trial. It describes the armed conflict’s scorched-earth practice: troops destroyed food, crops, houses and animals in Indigenous communities, and many bodies were buried in mass graves. The page does not present these details as scenery for an art-world provocation. It supplies the historical conditions that make the excavator impossible to read as a neutral machine.
In the performance, Galindo is naked, but the image does not offer exposure as confession. Her stillness resists the demand that a victim explain herself or make trauma consumable. MoMA says the excavator leaves her fixed and unrelenting; Galindo has described the work as standing ready to defend the land that roots her. The language of rooting makes the work’s refusal more precise. What is being threatened is not simply an individual body, nor an abstract environment. It is a relationship among body, place, memory and survival.
That relationship makes Tierra an argument about evidence. A grave may be hidden underground, a field may be made to look ordinary, and a history may be reduced to a statistic. The video keeps returning each of those abstractions to a material fact: earth is moved by a machine, and a human being remains in the frame. Its scale matters, too. When MoMA PS1 presented the work from April 4 to September 2, 2024, it showed the video larger than life. The enlargement did not make the history grander. It made avoidance harder.
“Tierra” means earth, but it also carries the force of territory and home. Galindo’s work refuses a sentimental version of either. The ground here is contested evidence: something worked, taken, scarred, buried in, and defended. To look at it is to confront how easily violence can be made to disappear when the land itself is treated as mute.