Artists: Esvin Alarcón Lam - Simón Vega - Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín

Our Place in These Worlds, at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, is an artist-led touring exhibition featuring works by Esvin Alarcón Lam, Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín, and Simón Vega. Curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes, the show is shaped through non-hierarchical collaboration and takes a collective, non-authoritarian approach centred on exchange. Challenging dominant Eurocentric ideas of belonging, Our Place in These Worlds engages with histories of colonisation and migration while resisting exoticisation and fixed notions of identity, opening space for shifting perspectives. The show considers how ideologies shape the ways worlds—and the lives within them—are imagined. In the context of ongoing debates around migration and cultural polarisation, Our Place in These Worlds advocates for more nuanced and relational approaches to identity. While some works have been part of the project since its first iteration in 2023, others are presented here for the first time.

The touring project is conceived by the three participating artists, whose continued dialogue forms its conceptual framework as it moves between contexts. Previously, the exhibition included a curatorial essay by María Jacinta Xón Riquiac, a Maya K’iche’ anthropologist and Indigenous rights activist. Our Place in These Worlds at Elizabeth Xi Bauer has been developed by curator Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes, marking further evolution through the introduction of her curatorial perspective. Additional reading will include a newly commissioned conversation between the three artists and de Pontes.

Esvin Alarcón Lam’s multidisciplinary practice examines mobility and cultural inheritance through the movement of symbols across geographies, with a particular focus on the Chinese diaspora in Central America, which he traces through his maternal grandfather. Working across performance, video, textile, and sculpture, Alarcón Lam brings together personal memory and ancestral stories to explore how they shift across generations. His works trace how motifs circulate and accrue layered associations as they move across settings, challenging fixed definitions of selfhood. Through this framework, Alarcón Lam foregrounds hybridity as a state shaped through encounters and continual negotiation.

Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín’s textile-based practice draws on Indigenous epistemologies and craft lineages that carry meaning through making.  Working with woven structures, he draws on his Tz’utujil Maya heritage to reflect cosmological understandings embedded in cloth and process. His works treat textiles as living systems that hold knowledge and encode ways of relating to land and community. Pichillá draws attention to Western hierarchies that separate art from craft, presenting weaving as a site of reclamation and contemporary expression.

Simón Vega’s practice draws on constructed environments shaped by speculation and displacement, using sculpture, installation, and drawing to reflect on postcolonial conditions. His works often bring together seemingly incompatible references, pairing everyday materials with DIY technologies to question prevailing notions of progress and aspiration. Through these juxtapositions, Vega addresses how futures are envisioned from the margins and how global power orders continue to influence such projections. His contribution to the exhibition positions humour and critique as tools for rethinking inherited narratives.

Previous versions of Our Place in These Worlds were presented at Sol del Río Gallery, Guatemala City (2023) and Liliana Bloch Gallery, Dallas (2025).