Healing through sound and community art 2 Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Feb 25 2025

Location: 

United States

Glowing softly in the West Texas desert night, artist Guadalupe Maravilla’s Mariposa Relámpago, was once an ordinary school bus but is now a richly decorated, mobile site for remembrance and healing. Like much of the artist’s work, this piece commemorates and confronts the artist’s journey to the United States as an unaccompanied, undocumented minor fleeing civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. Inspired by the ornate buses of his youth, the artwork is adorned with over 700 objects, ranging from healing instruments like gongs to personally symbolic objects like a pair of children’s shoes.

Following Maravilla’s path from El Salvador to the United States, the bus stops along the way to serve as a multi-level stage for healing ceremonies conducted by the artist himself. While temporarily stationed along the US-Mexico Border in Marfa, Texas, Maravilla invites both the general public and the nearby border worker community to experience one such healing ceremony. “I think everyone needs to heal something,” says Maravilla. “There’s a universal way of experiencing healing and it’s by using sound; everyone that’s alive feels it.”

A21 recently produced a video documentary on this project: https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/guadalupe-maravillas-mariposa-...

External sources: 

https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/guadalupe-maravillas-mariposa-relampag…
https://southwestcontemporary.com/guadalupe-maravilla-mariposa-relampago/
Posted by f.abbado on Mar 11 2025

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.
Provides (a useful service)Provides a useful social service.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear short-term goal. Short-term goals tend to be things like: create or repeal a law; get a President impeached; make the city administration repair a sidewalk. A campaign with a short-term goal needs a clear theory of change, complete with targets that can be cajoled or pressured into effecting the goal.
The sound ceremonies provide immediate relief for citizens and people affected by migration politics and it proposes for a model of community that is accessible and fruitable for all.
This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
This project catalyzes the healing power of sounds through the stimulation of ancient instruments. The artists' offering comes at no costs and is taken to them directly, as opposed of being presented behind close doors. Moreover it brings attention to migration politics.

Notes

Utilizing sound for healing is an ancient practice that has been utilized for centuries and in all parts of the world. For practicioners to offer this as an accessible, free of cost, activity defies the standardized system of monitazation that often characterizes artists' works. The artists' own lived experience as an undocumented migrant and cancer survivor is an aeffective narrative to share in allowing for people, regardless of their political views, to come together.