Artist Talk | Voices From Scorched Earth with Styvens Barrios Loch & Romi Fischer-Schmidt

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 | 7pm

Struts Gallery

Testimony from El Estor, Q’eqchi’ territory 

with Paydirt Artists in Residence Styvens Barrios Loch & Romi Fischer-Schmidt

El Estor, a community on Maya Q’eqchi’ territory (Guatemala), is the epicenter of a sixty-year struggle against a nickel mining company locally known as la empresa. Since 1960, Canadian mining corporations have funded deadly destruction through many means: INCO lobbied the military government to alter the Guatemalan constitution to allow for open pit mining and, counter to the resistance from Maya Q’eqchi’ people, established la empresa. The same mining company, in 1978, was involved in the first of the 626 massacres of Maya people that took place during Guatemala’s civil war (1960-1996). In 2004, Sky Resources purchased la empresa, and collaborated with police, military and security to evict Q’eqchi’ people from their lands. All the while, the mountainside jungle, Q’eqchi’ village sites, and water sources are blown up and sent away to be sold, leaving a barren red scar. There is no succinct way of describing how profoundly disruptive it is to the Indigenous eco-cultural fabric of El Estor. Today, with the looming threat of the Río Nickel mining project by Montreal-based company ‘Central America Nickel Inc.,’ the community is mounting a blockade.

Having established relationships with the community of El Estor over the past six years, media artists and musicians, Styvens Barrios Loch and Romi Fischer-Schmidt, aim to communicate the struggle of Maya Q’eqchi’ people in one of many mining industry sacrifice zones. The artists will talk about their recent visit to El Estor and present elements of their practice, which fuses community-based participatory research with music and audiovisual creation.

About the artists

Styvens Barrios Loch and Romi Fischer-Schmidt are an emerging queer transnational musical duo taking aim at transnational corporate mining and its ties with Guatemalan and imperial militarizing and policing apparatuses. Styvens is a Guatemalan cellist, musical historian and archivist. Romi is a multi-instrumentalist, activist and media artist settler born in Tkaronto. Styvens and Romi are the Paydirt Artists in Residence, part of Joshua Schwebel's project "One Hand Washes the Other".

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council.