Alan Marroquin & Francisco Valdes - Alien

At the beginning of 2020, Alan and Chisco, two artists from Guatemala went to develop separate projects in two opposing ends of the world. Chisco in Phoenix AZ and Alan in Japan. Due to COVID, their home country closed, so they got marooned.

“Visiting a place most of the time brings a positive mixture of emotions to the visitor, the excitement of discovering, the thrill of trying new things, the rapture of new experiences, and even a little fear for the unknown. The transformation from a visitor to an immigrant unwillingly started happening to us and started to make cultural differences more noticeable.

These conversations of images about the similarities of feeling alienated, dealing with cultural differences, and bureaucracy became our catharsis, our way to survive in these places to those new worlds, which were no longer to discover but to adapt, conquer, and to do it as a way to survive.”