Noticias de Bonampak [Bonampak News]

Pablo Vargas Lugo described Noticias de Bonampak—five newspaper pages printed with historical samples of Mayan calligraphy—as “a sort of historical trompe l'oeil.” This underscores the artist’s artifice in creating fiberglass “newspapers” that appear to be real, everyday objects from a distance, only revealing their symbolic content upon closer inspection. The artist explained that “Each text in this newspaper, regardless of its banality, has withstood the time and devastation entailed by the Spanish conquest, becoming a fragment of information whose current importance is in many cases totally disproportionate to its original intent.” Vargas Lugo’s artificial blend of historical and contemporary forms of communication challenges the limited place of Indigenous perspectives in mainstream narratives about history and present-day reality. His choice of the newspaper as a readymade matrix for disseminating current information underscores the urgency of broadcasting Indigenous voices in everyday life.