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Seeking the rain (2025)
Artist:
Giovanni Fabuán Guerrero
Cherán, located in the P’urhépecha Plateau in Michoacán, Mexico, is a community surrounded by pine and oak forests, interwoven with volcanic hills and fertile soils. Its geography has enabled the development of unique biodiversity and a deep relationship between the P’urhépecha people and their natural environment. However, illegal logging, the expansion of avocado monoculture, and organized crime violence have put both the ecosystem and the community’s autonomy at risk. In 2011, Cherán resisted, expelled the loggers, and established a self-governing system based on traditional customs. Since then, forest defense and reforestation have been fundamental pillars of its struggle for self-determination.
In this context, the uauapu, wild wasps that nest in the forests, build hives that have been harvested for generations by panaleros (honeycomb gatherers) in Cherán. This practice establishes a deep connection with the forest and its biodiversity. Artist Giovanni Fabián Guerrero has lived this experience from within: first as part of the festivities where uauapu hives are collected, later as a witness to the transformation of the territory, and now as a creator incorporating fragments of hive and honeycomb into his installations. His work invokes the presence of beings that inhabit the forest, in an exploration of the sacred, the political, and the ecological.
Buscar la lluvia (Seeking the rain) reconstructs the landscape of the P’urhépecha forest through material and symbolic layers. At its base, a large-format painting treated with pine charcoal alludes to the fires that have devastated Michoacán’s forests. Emerging from this surface are papier-mâché masks covered with sheets extracted from uauapu hives and pieces of pinewood—figures that represent the memory of the forest and its guardians. These beings are not demons, as the colonial gaze attempted to impose, but presences that challenge the separation between the human and the more-than-human.
The work also establishes a dialogue between Cherán and New York through their pine species—conifers that share an evolutionary lineage and essential ecological functions.
To highlight these territorial connections, Giovanni has collected fragments of wood from New York State’s forests to create a material link between the two landscapes. Buscar la lluvia is not just a testimony of loss but an affirmation of permanence. Rather than reconstructing a lost landscape, the work insists on the presence of what continues to inhabit.