Installation view of En Route Towards El Dorado: Deepened Relations and The Descent Back Home (2022), October 2022 to December 2022 at Grant Wahlquist Gallery (GWG). Image courtesy of GWG.

En Route Towards El Dorado: Deepened Relations and The Descent Back Home (2022)

Long before the 19th century’s discovery of gold within the interior highlands of the Guianas (modern-day Guyana), there was the legend of El Dorado, a golden city along the mythic Lake Parime. This legend captivated the royal courts of Western Europe and engendered a series of expeditions across the North Atlantic to the southwest regions of the Guianas throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Although the fabled city was never found, the legend of El Dorado persists as mythos, a prophetic allegory for the culture and economy of gold within Guyana’s historical cultural memory. 

En Route Towards El Dorado: Deepened Relations and The Descent Back Home is a conceptual photographic series that considers the implications of colonization, extraction, and modernity in Guyana’s mining history. How did the global flow of gold shape the spatial practices, cultural semiotics, and laboured movements of the Guyanese diaspora? More importantly, how does the body, as material, articulate the cultural hybridity of Guyanese globality within the American urban? Meandering a thin line between real and imagined space, En Route Towards El Dorado collides speculative fictions with historical truths to establish new sensibilities of knowing and seeing. Through portraiture, screen printing processes, and the domestic, I explore the social productions of Guyana’s gold mining practices, suggesting that the route towards El Dorado lies not in a physical path but in the spatial-temporal articulations of the body. In this series, the legend of El Dorado persists as practice, an immaterial production of my West-Indian American ethnicity.