Subheadline: Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace) transformed MoMA’s Kravis Studio into a space where performance, memory, political violence, and theatrical imagination converge.
For Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, history is rarely a fixed record. It is something fragmented, inherited, performed, and sometimes deliberately obscured. Earlier this year, the Guatemalan artist brought that approach to New York with Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace), a multidisciplinary work presented at The Museum of Modern Art’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio.
Presented as MoMA’s first presentation of the work, Lugar de Consuelo brought together video, costumes, props, prints, drawings, sculpture, and live performance to investigate the political and personal histories surrounding Guatemala’s long civil war. The project transformed the museum’s performance space into something closer to a theatrical archive—one in which historical evidence and imaginative reconstruction continually overlap.
From Family Memory to Museum Stage
At the center of Lugar de Consuelo is a story connected to the Guatemalan playwright Hugo Carrillo’s El Corazón del espantapájaros (Heart of the Scarecrow), written in 1962.
The play became entangled with Guatemala’s political repression during the country’s civil war. Ramírez-Figueroa learned about the history through his uncle, who had participated in a production of the play. According to MoMA, the artist’s subsequent research relied significantly on oral accounts, opening a complicated space between documented history, family memory, and what can no longer be fully verified.
That uncertainty is important to the work. Rather than presenting history as a straightforward reconstruction, Ramírez-Figueroa uses theater to explore what happens when memory survives through stories, images, objects, and bodily gestures.
His practice—spanning performance, printmaking, sculpture, and installation—frequently addresses collective memory, displacement, state violence, and colonial legacies in Latin America. MoMA identifies him as a Guatemalan artist born in 1978, while the Museo Reina Sofía notes his broader international exhibition history, including presentations at Tate Modern, the New Museum, The Power Plant, and Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá.
An Archive That Refuses to Stay Still
At MoMA, Lugar de Consuelo did not appear simply as a performance.
The Kravis Studio installation incorporated five baroque costumes, props, watercolor sketches, aquatints, and a video documenting an earlier performance staged at the Universidad Popular de Guatemala—the site associated with the censored theatrical history that inspired the work. MoMA’s collection record describes the work as a multimedia ensemble incorporating high-definition video, costumes, props, nine aquatints, and 27 watercolor sketches.
This constellation of objects changes the way a viewer approaches political history. A costume is no longer merely theatrical. A drawing becomes evidence of an investigation. A video becomes both documentation and interpretation.
The result is an archive that remains visibly theatrical.
Ramírez-Figueroa has described the project as emerging from his attempt to understand stories passed down through his family. In a 2026 MoMA conversation, he explained that his research eventually led him away from trying to establish every historical fact and toward considering what the story meant within a Guatemalan artistic community still affected by political trauma, paranoia, and self-censorship.
The Scarecrow and the Theater of Power
The theatrical structure of Lugar de Consuelo revolves around five characters: a president, an oligarch, a soldier, a priest, and a scarecrow.
For the New York presentation, Ramírez-Figueroa collaborated with poet Wingston González on a new script. MoMA describes these figures as clownish archetypes of despotic power, allowing the work to move between political critique, ritual, absurdity, and fantasy.
That combination is central to Ramírez-Figueroa’s visual language.
Instead of reproducing historical violence literally, the artist filters it through theatrical transformation. Human figures can become animalistic, vegetal, mechanical, or fantastical. Costumes become extensions of bodies; bodies become symbols; and political history becomes something that can be staged, distorted, repeated, and reimagined.
The resulting atmosphere is neither conventional historical reconstruction nor pure fiction. It occupies an unstable middle ground where the absurd can expose what straightforward realism sometimes cannot.
Performance as Historical Reclamation
The live component gave Lugar de Consuelo its most direct connection to theater.
The New York production was the work’s first staging in the city following earlier public presentations in São Paulo and Los Angeles. The June 2026 performances alternated between Spanish and English and took place at MoMA’s Kravis Studio from June 16 through June 28.
For MoMA, the performances were not an accessory to the exhibition. They were its culmination.
That distinction matters because Ramírez-Figueroa’s work treats performance as a way of activating memory rather than merely representing it. The theater becomes a living mechanism through which historical fragments can be revisited by new bodies, voices, costumes, and audiences.
The work therefore asks a larger question: What happens when an artwork inherits a history that cannot be completely recovered?
MoMA’s Kravis Studio as a Site for Experimentation
The presentation also reflects the particular role of the Kravis Studio within MoMA.
Located on the Museum’s fourth floor, the space provides a dedicated platform for live art, performance, sound, moving image, and experimental practices. Its programming moves between exhibitions, commissions, residencies, workshops, and performances, giving artists opportunities to blur the conventional distinctions between artwork, stage, archive, and audience.
Lugar de Consuelo was especially suited to that environment.
The project does not fit neatly into the category of painting, sculpture, film, theater, or installation. Instead, it depends on the interaction among all of them. Its significance lies partly in that refusal of categorization.
Memory, Absence, and the Right to Imagine
Perhaps the most compelling dimension of Lugar de Consuelo is its understanding of historical uncertainty.
Ramírez-Figueroa’s research began with a family story. The details could not all be corroborated. Rather than treating that absence as a failure, the artist turned it into a creative condition.
That strategy allows the work to consider memory not simply as something preserved but as something continuously reconstructed.
In this sense, Lugar de Consuelo is about more than Guatemala. Its questions resonate with a wider contemporary artistic concern: how can artists address histories of political violence without reducing them to documentary images or simplified narratives?
Ramírez-Figueroa responds through theatricality, humor, embodiment, costume, symbolism, and ambiguity.
The result is a work in which the archive becomes alive—and where the stage becomes a place for confronting what history has left unresolved.
A New York Presentation with Lasting Resonance
Although the MoMA presentation and its June performances have now concluded, Lugar de Consuelo remains significant within the Museum’s expanding engagement with Latin American and Caribbean art and with experimental forms that cross the boundaries between visual art and performance.
MoMA acquired the work in 2022 through its Latin American and Caribbean Fund and the Fund for the Twenty-First Century. Its presentation in the Kravis Studio gave New York audiences an opportunity to encounter the work not simply as an object in a collection, but as a living, theatrical system.
Ramírez-Figueroa’s achievement is ultimately one of transformation. A family story becomes research. Research becomes images and objects. Objects become costumes and characters. Characters become performance. And performance becomes a temporary community gathered around a history that refuses to remain silent.
At MoMA, Lugar de Consuelo demonstrated how contemporary art can turn the gaps in historical memory into spaces for imagination—and how, sometimes, the stage can become an archive of its own.
Source: The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
