Francisco Guevara is a visual artist and independent scholar whose conceptual art practice focuses on revealing the entanglements between art, power, and the writing of art history, examining how they shape perceptions of identity and the ‘body.’ His work spans a wide range of media, including painting with organic pigments, food installations, and the use of precious materials such as feathers, silver, and gems to explore the influence of visual culture on our understanding of history and society. With 2025 marking twenty-five years of his artistic practice, Guevara has exhibited extensively in individual and group shows worldwide. His most recent exhibitions—“Omens of Empire,” “Treasures of Adverse Possession,” “Ethos of Transfiguration,” and “De lo Bello a lo Invisible”—have sparked new interest in his work, particularly his engagement with museums and permanent collections to explore themes of coloniality, colour, and the ethics of extraction. He co-founded Arquetopia Foundation, an internationally recognised non-profit arts foundation with sites in Puebla, Oaxaca (Mexico), and Cusco (Peru). Since 2009, Arquetopia has fostered social transformation through educational, artistic, and cultural programmes.

Guevara’s experience spans more than twenty-five years of designing, curating, and managing art projects, facilitating development, sustainability and social transformation through visual arts education, historiography of art, and art exhibitions. He specializes in anticolonial ethical models applied to cultural ecosystems and in the analysis of contemporary artistic practices. His essays, critical texts, teaching methods, and lectures have been disseminated internationally and translated into several languages. Guevara has had more than twenty solo shows and participated in multiple collective exhibits. His work can be found in important private and public collections such as Museo Jumex, Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño in Mexico City, Lila Downs Collection Mexico, Ministry of Culture of Bolivia, Salma Hayek Collection USA, and the Margrethe II Collection Denmark, among others.

For his recently opened exhibition ‘De lo Bello a lo Invisible’ (‘From the Beautiful to the Invisible’), on display at the Museo José Luis Bello y González in Puebla, Mexico (15 August 2025–18 January 2026), Guevara brings together nearly 80 works, among them early modern feather mosaics and new feather creations.

De lo Bello a lo Invisible: General view of the exhibition, 2025. Photo: courtesy of Arquetopia Foundation.

De lo Bello a lo Invisible: General view of the exhibition, 2025. Photo: courtesy of Arquetopia Foundation.

 

For this exhibition, Guevara produced several new feather artworks specifically in response to Stefan Hanß’s open access journal article ‘Feathers and the Making of Luxury Experiences at the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Court,’ published in Renaissance Studies, the journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies, 37, no. 3 (2023), pp. 399–438.

What follows is a conversation about feather arts past and present, between Francisco Guevara and Stefan Hanß. We are grateful for the artist to publish this conversation with The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective, The University of Manchester.

De lo Bello a lo Invisible is on display at the Museo José Luis Bello y González, Puebla, Mexico from 15 August 2025 to 18 January 2026.

 

The Exhibition: Overview

Stefan Hanß: It is wonderful to talk to you, Francisco, and to learn about your artistic work! Thank you so much for getting in touch and for taking the time for this interview.

Please, tell us about the exhibition. Some of our readers will not have the chance to travel to Mexico, so perhaps you can take them onto an imaginative journey through the exhibition?

Francisco Guevara: Thank you for inviting me! These dialogues are wonderful opportunities to share my artistic practice as an open process, especially my most recent exhibition De lo Bello a lo Invisible (‘From the Beautiful to the Invisible’) a response to selected pieces from Museo José Luis Bello y González in Puebla, Mexico.

I am always concerned with the act of seeing, because looking is a world-making activity. My exhibition therefore begins with the question of what it means to return a gaze—to respond to historical ways of looking by inviting viewers into a critical dialogue with how official history has been written.

Earlier this year, the Hispanic Society of America presented an exhibition titled A Room of Her Own: The Estrado and the Hispanic World. The show focused on the estrado, a female domestic space that originated in medieval Spain and later spread among wealthy households across the Spanish world, including colonial Latin America. To put it simply, the estrado was not just a private or leisurely space. It was a room where women displayed luxury objects—textiles, silver, ceramics, books, paintings—as a way to host, socialize, and negotiate status. The objects in these rooms revealed global networks of trade and influence, connecting Islamic, European, Asian, and American worlds.

De lo Bello a lo Invisible: General view of the estrado, 2025. Photo: courtesy of Arquetopia Foundation.

 

Francisco Guevara: While the exhibition was visually striking and offered an interesting theme—especially in how it highlighted women’s collective practices and daily life in Spanish America—it also simplified the history it was trying to recover. The curatorial narrative tended to oversimplify the diverse forms of knowledge women held in the Americas. By highlighting activities such as bobbin lace-making and witchcraft as emblematic of these rooms, the exhibition risked reducing complex histories to clichés and reinforcing stereotypes about women’s creativity and intellectual labour.

Although the exhibition presents itself as a recovery of the estrado, it overlooks the violence and inequality that made these spaces and objects possible. It reinforces an elitist and uniform view of women’s history—focused on those who had access to such salons—while ignoring the Indigenous, mestiza, and enslaved women who created and maintained that luxury.

I conceived De lo Bello a lo Invisible as a conceptual response to that exhibition, created specifically for the Bello Museum—one of Mexico’s first modern museums, shaped by the taste and worldview of a wealthy nineteenth-century family from Puebla. The act of collecting in Mexico has historically functioned as a civic practice of symbolic appropriation in response to global and often violent processes. By bringing together objects from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, the museum collection articulates a vision of nationhood in which Mexican identity emerges not through isolation but as a critical and aspirational synthesis of global cultures.

My exhibition De lo Bello a lo Invisible opens a space to reconsider historical responsibility—not only toward those who look back at us from the past, but toward ourselves, as inheritors and reproducers of the very structures that have shaped us. It reveals how histories that seem distant are deeply intertwined. A single object can make this visible—for example, the imperial connection between Moctezuma II of Tenochtitlan and Elizabeth I of England through a black obsidian mirror.

De lo Bello a lo Invisible: General view of the exhibition, 2025. Photo: courtesy of Arquetopia Foundation.

 

Francisco Guevara: The exhibition weaves multiple threads through the history of extraction, exploring the visible and the invisible through the notion of preciousness in colonial commodities: brazilwood, cochineal, indigo, feathers, pearls, silver, gold, gemstones, and textiles in the production of taste—all within the systems of extraction, whether colonial, neocolonial, or neoliberal, that continue to shape our identities today through the modern circulation of violence and wealth. For the visual narrative, I draw inspiration from iconic works of visual culture that have defined the history of empire: the Armada Portraits of Elizabeth I, J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of Carthage, and documents such as the Cantino Planisphere, the Yanhuitlán and Florentine Codices, and the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. The exhibition brings together more than eighty works—forty-three selected from the museum’s collection of over three thousand pieces, in dialogue with my own contemporary works created in response.

 

Featherworks on Display: Beauty, Empire, Violence

 

Stefan Hanß: What are your favourite featherworks in the exhibition? Why? What makes them special?

Francisco Guevara: During my research on the connections between Tudor England and the Americas, I became interested in how the Tudors used images to shape their imperial vision—adopting materials and technologies from elsewhere, such as the black mirror, Chinese porcelain, and of course feathers, to project a global sense of power. In that process, I encountered the concept of imperial hybrids, used to describe objects that blend European decorative traditions with symbols and practices associated with foreign rulers. Yet the idea of hybridity is, a fantasy, an impossibility that assumes the coming together of two purities. No such thing exists, and my work seeks to question precisely that assumption.

For the Glory of God and the Conversion of Many (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Francisco Guevara: This is how I came across your article, “Feathers and the Making of Luxury Experiences at the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Court,” where you discuss material cross-citationality—a concept that deeply resonated with my practice. As an artist interested in language, I understand artistic techniques as vocabularies—systems through which new visual rhythms can emerge. In my last four solo exhibitions, I have been interested in exploring the notion of Empire as an abstraction—the ideological culmination of everything horrific that has occurred in the world, what art historian Kirsten Buick describes as “every awful thing that […] has [been] done to people and groups of people.”¹ None can elude the atrocities of ideology; we all are colonized subjects as we can’t escape class, sexual, gendered, spiritual, linguistic, geographic, and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system.

The Honourable Heart of Empire (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Francisco Guevara: Considering all of this, I became interested in creating precious objects. I imagined new forms that could serve as contemporary equivalents to ancient notions of the sacred, yet represent the history of Empire which we continue to revere daily. I wanted Empire to reveal itself through the very materials that, throughout history, have seduced us with their alluring beauty. For instance, I used the vibrancy of feathers, with their innate ability to refract light, to frame iconic symbols of extermination such as the seal of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition, the merchant’s mark of the East India Company, the constellation maps used by the Dutch to invade Indonesia, and devotional objects like the altar pax, which became a weapon against Indigenous communities in the Americas, targeting their knowledge systems for destruction.

 

The Matter of Feathers

Francisco Guevara: As dark as these pieces may seem, they possess a haunting beauty that was thrilling to witness came into being.

My favourites are the ones that seem to be alive—because feathers react to temperature and humidity, each visit reveals them slightly transformed, shifting into a different posture or configuration.

Among those are Dispute of the “New World” (2024), made with amber, silver, emeralds, and feathers, thinking about the legacy of the Inquisition in the Americas; Striving for Imperial Power (2024), an amber medal mounted on silver with rubies and feathers, inspired by the Armada medal commissioned by Elizabeth I to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 celebrating the English aspirations to invade the Americas; and The Sacrifice of the Immortal Queen (2024), a pax altar made from walnut wood, amber, pearls, baroque pearls, gemstones, and feathers, responding to the Mexican Pax recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). However, my ultimate favorite —and the centerpiece of the exhibition—is The Rape of Europa (2025). The piece is inspired by the Armada Portrait and intersects it with Tezcatlipoca’s obsidian mirror, later acquired by John Dee, who used it to predict the date of Elizabeth I’s coronation and which is now held in the British Museum.

Dispute of the “New World” (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Striving for Imperial Power (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Stefan Hanß: Feathers are alive, as you rightly put it. Feathers are so unique, with stunning material and sensorial qualities. They can be incredibly soft or hard, iridescent in appearance, and rich in colour hues or colour intensity. Feathers come with unique material, visual, and experiential affordances for creative artists. What does it mean to you to work with feathers?

Francisco Guevara: In my practice as both an artist and scholar at Arquetopia International Artist Residency Programs, I have been researching the concept of rhythm as it relates to intuition, connecting it to the artistic processes of the many visual artists and writers who participate in our programs. In recent years, my research has focused on Mesoamerican knowledge systems, where I encountered the concept of ixiptla, brilliantly articulated by anthropologist and historian Alfredo López Austin.²

López Austin explains that the Nahua worldview did not separate mind, body, and spirit as distinct entities; in other words, “body” is an invention and it did not exist, because we are a state of eternal movement—of being in flux. Existence was conceived as a system of forces or animic essences in constant exchange with the cosmos, where life was understood through flows and transformations rather than containment—dynamic rather than bounded forms. Ixiptla does not refer to a physical vessel but to the embodiment or actualization of a divine presence through a specific form of movement—whether expressed as a being, a deity, or a practice. Beings, including humans, were understood as porous, relational, and cosmological—nodes within a web of energies connecting gods, ancestors, living beings, and elements.

To me, feathers embody that same understanding of eternity—our own eternity reflected in the colours revealed by the light they refract. I believe that in Mesoamerica, feathers were not revered as mere objects but as a form of text in movement—so powerful that they transformed every definition of art in Europe after their introduction in the sixteenth century. I use them as devices, to seduce the viewer, drawing them into the horrors of history as lingering an open-ended question.

 

Workshopping Feathers

Stefan Hanß: Can you take our readers on an imaginative journey through your workshop? What challenges do you face in there when working with feathers? And how do you overcome them?

Francisco Guevara: Many of my pieces, I dreamed them—not as revelations, but as a way of processing the research I’m constantly engaged with. For me dreams are an essential space to create, an extension of my workshop, along with watching documentaries, reading, and bouncing ideas with my favourite people. I keep chats and conversations as an archive of the ideas, questions, methods, and resources I work with.

Stefan Hanß: I am so glad we are having this conversation! I love the idea that the published interview will be an “archive of […] ideas, questions, methods, and resources.”

Francisco Guevara:

Such conversations are also an extension of my workshop—they become a form of collaboration and a way to test my ideas.

From there, I begin experimenting with different techniques, often working with several at the same time. Sometimes my entire house turns into a studio, a space where I test the work and share it with my colleagues. While boiling cochineal, I might also be sketching, painting, embroidering, assembling, or arranging feathers to understand how they can sustain a particular structure. When I first began working with feathers, I had no idea how resilient they are or how intricate the patterns they form when refracting light. I usually also work on several pieces simultaneously, keeping boxes of materials organized by type—different tools, media, and adhesives. Part of the process I enjoy is collaborating with experts and creatives so that I cannot fully control the outcome; the process becomes a dialogue, and the results are always more surprising and interesting than I could have imagined. My workshop therefore extends beyond its physical space—it includes other locations, minds, and transatlantic routes. I like following the historical paths through which materials and forms once moved, both in these collaborations and when exhibiting the work.

In terms of challenges with feathers and other materials, I think the biggest one is always what to say. What could I possibly express when so much has already been said or created throughout history? So, I focus instead on the kinds of questions that interest me, on the dark secrets from history that I’m excited to reveal. I also think that finding generous scholars—and in general, generous people—is a challenge. When I come across an exciting essay, I tend to reach out; some scholars have been incredibly generous, and others never respond. But I also think feathers are a tricky niche, especially in art, and reading your work was very inspiring.

 

Material Cross-Citationality

Stefan Hanß: Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. Some of your new featherwork, you said, has been influenced by my article on sixteenth-century feather workers (plumajeros) at the Spanish court. How so?

Francisco Guevara: Absolutely! In the sixteenth century, the Americas became one of the main sources of technologies and knowledge. After the colonial invasion, objects never before seen in Europe entered its markets, stripped of their original meanings and transformed into symbols of conquest. The central piece of my exhibition is The Rape of Europa, inspired by the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, painted after the defeat of the Spanish fleet in 1588, which is an allegory of imperial ambition. In the painting, as you know, the queen appears with a fan with ostrich-feathers imported from Africa and a gown encrusted with pearls extracted by African and Indigenous divers in Bermuda and the Caribbean; she rests her hand on a globe that highlights the Americas projecting England’s global ambitions.

For The Rape of Europa, I was interested in addressing obsidian mirrors, indigo, pearls, and feathers not simply as materials, but as conceptual problems. These materials circulated globally through colonial economies and, when introduced into European courts, accumulated symbolic weight. As you note in your essay, feathers became saturated with meaning—objects of status that fuelled consumer desire and reshaped material culture across early modern Europe. The framework of what you termed “citational material practices” helped clarify what I was trying to do: to understand how materials do not merely reference history, but actively carry it. Feathers, obsidian mirrors, pearls, and indigo were not neutral commodities; they became agents of taste, power, and ultimately, Empire.

The Rape of Europa (2025), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Francisco Guevara: The Rape of Europa consists of two interdependent components. The first is a macaroni-style coat, made from Bogolan indigo mud cloth from Mali and tailored locally in Puebla. In the eighteenth century, the macaroni style was adopted by young British aristocrats traveling through Italy on the Grand Tour—a moment when cultural consumption became a performance of status and imperial desire. By using indigo mud cloth, a material historically bound to West African knowledge systems, slavery and indigo plantations in the Americas, the coat traces a long arc of extraction, from sixteenth-century courtly economies to the coloniality embedded in contemporary textile production as well as tourism.

The second component is a detachable mirror inspired by the Armada Portrait. It is adorned with black and white ostrich feathers and baroque pearls, framed by a laser-engraved rendering of Elizabeth I’s cartwheel ruff, and intersected with Coryn Boel’s engraving after Titian’s The Rape of Europa, executed in India ink and silver leaf. Embedded within it is an exact reproduction of the obsidian mirror once owned by John Dee—Elizabeth I’s astrologer, navigator, and consultant—now held in the British Museum. To look into this mirror is to confront a surface that refuses clarity. The reflection appears dark, unstable, and difficult to grasp, compelling the viewer to ask: Where are you standing? What do you see?

In this work, citational material practices do not operate as mere references; they expose the endurance of imperial structures by forcing the viewer to confront their own position within them.

Materials become historical witnesses.

They reveal that the legacies of Empire are not behind us—they remain active in the ways we look, desire, collect, and move through the world.

Stefan Hanß: What does material cross-citationality mean to you? How does it impact your work as a visual artist working with feathers?

Francisco Guevara: I love art techniques—like any other nerdy artist. I am especially drawn to techniques that, throughout history, have been linked to possession and imperial treasure. Precious metals, woods, gemstones, feathers, textiles, dyes: all of them have been associated with taste, wealth, and, inevitably, extraction.

Over time, I’ve realized that the beauty they carry is inseparable from the violence that produced them. Their seduction is built on a history that binds us all—one we cannot escape.

So what do we do with that knowledge? Where do we go from there? The point is not to dwell on horror, but to avoid repeating it. These are the kinds of questions I’m constantly asked in our residency programs at Arquetopia. Many of the artists I mentor are searching for an alternative—something hopeful. But instead of masking history or polishing it until it shines, I believe we must face it.

The only way not to repeat harm is to remember it, and to ask difficult, meaningful questions—about the world, and about our own complicity within it. In this context, I understand cross-citationality as an opportunity to reconfigure ways of seeing.

For instance, when engaging with beauty—which historically has been used as a weapon—it can be redirected as a form of seduction opening a question rather than closing an argument. Beauty becomes an invitation to enter the work, but once inside, it demands an ethical commitment. Artists are full of questions, not answers, and through our practice we can insert those questions back into dominant visual discourses in order to interrupt them.

Astronomicum Caesareum (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Seventh Omen (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Encountering Feathers: Levinas, Lorde, and Rancière

Francisco Guevara: Jacques Rancière describes this through the notion of dissensus: a reorganization of the sensible in which there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation imposing its obviousness on everyone. Every situation, can be cracked open from within and reconfigured into a new regime of perception and meaning. To reconfigure what can be seen and what can be thought is to alter the field of the possible—the distribution of capacities and incapacities—and therefore to create a space in which ethics can be embraced. Dissensus reintroduces into play the very conditions of what can be perceived, imagined, and transformed, along with who is capable of altering the coordinates of our shared world.

Stefan Hanß: I read that you also have a particular interest in Levinasian ethics. Does the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas also shape your approach to feathers?

Francisco Guevara: Yes, I always keep in mind two thinkers who have profoundly shaped my practice: Audre Lorde and Emmanuel Levinas. Both reflect on the encounter. For Levinas, the face-to-face encounter is the moment where ethical transformation becomes possible; it reveals the infinite responsibility each person bears toward another—an ethical demand that precedes any law or contract.

Levinas also warns that art can substitute images for being. Images, he argues, do not simply point to objects so we may understand them; instead, they function as doubles, resembling things the way shadows do. This substitution can lead to disengagement: art risks becoming an evasion of responsibility, since it offers consolation rather than a challenge. For that reason, I often describe the encounter as the only space or time that has not yet been fully colonized or domesticated. We tend to colonize encounters—domesticate them—by accepting ideology as reality and imposing prearranged meanings onto one another. But we can resist that impulse. One possibility of resistance lies in artistic practice—not in art as an object, but in practice itself, because practice is movement.

This is how I understand what feathers can do. They refract light, a manifestation of the movement, the rhythms, the continual change we all experience.

I am drawn to feathers not only for their historical significance but because they engage us in movement. They become an entry point to recognize that our histories could be different from the moment we engage with one another.

 

The Significance of Early Modern Crafts in Our Times

Stefan Hanß: The exhibition brings your new feather creations into a conversation with a sixteenth-century feather mosaic of Saint Anthony of Padua. As an artist working with feathers today, what do you see when you have a look at early modern feather mosaics? How do your creative work and artistic experiences influence the way you engage with feather mosaics from the past? Does early modern featherwork impact your creativity?

Francisco Guevara: It was a dream come true to have my work shown alongside such an extraordinary piece. It was, in fact, one of the main reasons I decided to produce these last two exhibitions. The previous show, Ethos of Transfiguration, at the Museo Universitario Casa de los Muñecos (BUAP), examined the legacy of the Society of Jesus in the Americas—particularly in Puebla—and the museum generously allowed me to select fourteen artworks from their collection. Among those works, I selected an eighteenth-century feather mosaic of Our Lady of Sorrows. That piece inspired me to create the altar pax The Sacrifice of the Immortal Queen, based on an eighteenth-century print by José de Nava from Puebla and inspired by the recently acquired Mexican pax at LACMA.

Ethos of Transfiguration: View of the cochineal gallery, 2024. Photo: courtesy of Arquetopia Foundation.

Our Lady of Sorrows (eighteenth century), Museo Casa de los Muñecos BUAP. Photo by Francisco Guevara.

The Sacrifice of the Immortal Queen (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Francisco Guevara: As you mentioned, I am interested in bringing viewers into a conversation that invites them to ask: Where are we standing, and why are we here? I am aware that there is a risk in exhibiting contemporary artworks alongside objects from previous centuries—especially the sixteenth century, which was such a tumultuous and significant moment for the Americas. But as you said, placing these works together opens a conversation, one that asks us to question history. I always keep in mind James Baldwin’s words: “History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.” It is crucial to understand that the gap between the old and the new can never be closed, thus creating a tension revealing our position. Even if we cannot fully comprehend the past, it continues to inform the present. In the end, history is a narrative, and it is not fixed; therefore, it must be confronted with questions. And the questions that interest me are about the writing of history because it influences directly our acting in the present.

In Mesoamerica—before the colonial invasion—there was a deep preoccupation with the tension between the visible and the invisible. For that reason, they developed technologies to see beyond what seems to be immediately present: mirrors, codices, and sacred bundles, among others. Yet simply possessing one of these devices, or even being able to see through it, did not guarantee understanding. I interpret this as a continuous cycle: questioning, researching, pondering, creating—and then repeating. I think of my exhibition in that same realm. It operates as a device activated by the viewer, allowing them to see beyond what seems to be present in the museum.

San Antonio of Padua (sixteenth century), Museo José Luis Bello y González. Photo by Francisco Guevara.

First Omen (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Francisco Guevara: For instance, in the dialogue between the feather pieces, I wanted to make the notion of the divine visible again by confronting it with the seemingly invisible violence of history. In the case of the sixteenth-century feather mosaic of Saint Anthony of Padua, this meant placing its beauty in direct tension with the historical conditions that made it possible. The work I selected to respond to the mosaic was The First Omen. It is also a feather mosaic, made with indigo-dyed wool, ostrich and pheasant feathers, and turquoise beads forming the constellation of Orion’s Belt. The piece draws on the eight omens described in the Florentine Codex that announced the end of the world to Moctezuma. I interpret that moment as the birth of modernity: the arrival of capitalism, extermination, and extraction.

Stefan Hanß: Mexico itself has, of course, such a rich tradition and history of innovative featherwork. Is there any historical featherwork that you find particularly inspiring and, if so, why?

Francisco Guevara: I think many of the technologies that emerged in the Americas—and were later extracted and introduced into Europe—fundamentally transformed the notion of the image by creating new ways of seeing and understanding. When I think about feathers, I extend this transformation to artworks influenced by these technologies, even when they are not made of feathers but can produce a similar effect. Therefore, although some of my favorite works are not featherworks themselves, they operate through a similar idea using the notion of feathers for opacity and revelation. For instance, the cuauhxicalli sculptures (‘eagle vessels’) from the Templo Mayor, which inspired my amber ring piece Toltecayotl in the exhibition De lo Bello a lo Invisible. I also admire illuminations and miniature painting, such as the peacock-feather illuminations by the Master of Mary of Burgundy, and the Tabernacle of Moses made in opus plumarium (featherwork) from the Bible Historiale commented by Guiart des Moulins.

Toltecayotl (2025) Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Francisco Guevara: Regarding feather mosaics, I love the Weeping Virgin by Juan Cuiris, the Mass of Saint Gregory, the Salvator Mundi, the featherworks in the Ochavo Chapel of the Cathedral of Puebla, and the surviving chimallis, including the feather chalice disk and the feather coyote shield in the Weltmuseum in Vienna. I am also fascinated by wearable feather pieces—chimallis can also be understood in this way. Among my favorites are The Tree of Jesse, the feather-mosaic miter in Milan, the red Tupinambá capes, and the feather blankets and tunics from Peru, which are absolutely extraordinary. In the Andean world, highly sophisticated abstract visual languages were developed, and these inspired me to create the piece Carrying the Faith to the Indies and Beyond. The work draws from a Peruvian qero vessel featuring Habsburg eagles, which I translated into indigo-dyed feathers and coral.³

Carrying the Faith to the Indies and Beyond (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Stefan Hanß: Craft practices and artistic engagement with feathers have changed over the centuries, of course. How do you think Mexican feather-working techniques have changed, and how do you see the future of feather arts in Mexico and beyond?

Francisco Guevara: I think over the centuries in Mexico the production of images, including art, has been reorganized with different purposes. Although the notion of craft could be traced all the way to the descriptions of the amantecas (feather artists) described in the Florentine Codex, which were at the same time philosophers, makers and artists, by the nineteenth century craft became associated with class and sometimes also gender. For instance, there are incredible artists working with feathers in Michoacan that are revolutionizing textiles, producing absolutely stunning rebozos with complex weaving structures incorporating include feathers. There are also artists that are still making feather mosaics, but frequently limiting their works with a nineteenth-century landscape and picturesque tradition. On the other hand, contemporary artist mostly address Mesoamerica as a distant past, and even when they seem to critique nationalistic narratives, they tend to exoticize violence and contribute to the racialization of class differences, limiting the questioning of history supported by the apparatus of contemporary art museums which are linked to the art markets, which of course is highly problematic. As Timothy Mitchell explains, “colonising refers not simply to the establishing of a European presence but also to the spread of a political order that inscribes in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real.”⁴

I think the task at hand is to question official narratives, as uncomfortable as it may seem. That of course includes all kinds of visual languages in art, as well as the spaces where images get disseminated, such as museums, galleries, and exhibition venues. But also, any spaces that are meant for the purpose of learning and creating, including schools, universities, and of course artist residencies. In any given context, our spatial relations can tell us about our social relations relative to gendered, classed, and racialized hierarchies.

The question is not really what images are but what they can do.

Regardless of the artist intention, we must instead understand objects as opportunities and as communicating events, which means to embrace our responsibility to interrupt dominant narratives, especially if we believe change is necessary in this world.

We need to turn the art experience into a process rather than defining art as a final object.

Nick Mirzoeff explains that looking is not passive—every act of looking shapes the world and has the potential to transform it. To end the violent visual regime in which we are forced to live, we must expose and challenge the ways it structures perception, time, and space. He calls this “seeing in the dark.”⁵ Seeing in the dark means confronting what dominant colonial vision tries to obscure: hidden shared histories, suppressed narratives, and ongoing forms of violence we continue to experience. It is both personal and political. To see in the dark is an act of solidarity—a constant commitment to remain in dialogue.

I understand featherworks, as well as many other art techniques, as vocabularies of rhythm—opportunities to listen and to learn how to move with one another, even when we fail to fully understand each other. In the end, that is what solidarity is about.

Stefan Hanß: Thank you very much, Francisco, I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation, which I am sure will continue. Thank you for taking the time.

 

Interested readers can find more information on the artist, the exhibition, and the academic journal article.

 

References

¹ “Q&A with Kirsten Pai Buick by Stephanie Cash,” Burnaway, March 18, 2016, https://burnaway.org/magazine/kirsten-pai-buick/ (accessed November 10, 2025).

² Among many publications, see Alfredo López Austin, Hombre-Dios: Religión y política en el mundo náhuatl (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1973).

³ On Peruvian featherwork, see Heidi King, Peruvian Featherworks: Art of the Precolumbian Era (New York, NY, and New Haven, CT: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2012); Stefan Hanß, “Material Encounters: Knotting Cultures in Early Modern Peru and Spain,” The Historical Journal 62, no. 3 (2019): 583–615.

⁴ Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt: With a New Preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), ix.

⁵ Nicholas Mirzoeff, To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 (London: Pluto Press, 2025).

 

List of Images

Postcard De lo Bello a lo Invisible

General View of the Exhibition, 2025. (4 images) Photo: courtesy of Arquetopia Foundation.

Ethos of Transfiguration view of the cochineal gallery, 2024. Photo: courtesy of Arquetopia Foundation.

San Antonio of Padua (16^th Century) Museo José Luis Bello y González. Photo by Francisco Guevara.

Our Lady of Sorrows (18^th Century) Museo Casa de los Muñecos BUAP. Photo by Francisco Guevara

First Omen (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Dispute of the “New World” (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

The Honourable Heart of Empire (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Seventh Omen (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

The Rape of Europa (2025), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

The Sacrifice of the Immortal Queen (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Striving for Imperial Power (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Toltecayotl (2025) Photo: courtesy of the artist.

For the Glory of God and the Conversion of Many (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Astronomicum Caesareum (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Carrying the Faith to the Indies and Beyond (2024), Photo: courtesy of the artist.

 

Related