Clara de Tezanos is a Guatemalan artist living and creating in Antigua, whose work moves between light, ritual, and reverence. Drawing from both the tangible and the metaphysical, she creates images, objects, and installations that invite us to slow down and reconsider our relationship with the world around us.Trained in photography at The New School Parsons Paris and Spéos, Clara began her practice through lens-based work, but her curiosity has always extended beyond the frame. From 2009 to 2018, she co-founded and directed La Fototeca, Guatemala’s Center for Contemporary Photography, as well as the GuatePhoto Festival, establishing important platforms for visual culture, education, and experimentation in Central America.Her books Piedra-Padre, Universo and Por Maniobras de un Terceto received international recognition, with both shortlisted by institutions including Paris Photo–Aperture, PhotoEspaña, and Rencontres d’Arles. Her installations and exhibitions, including La Fuente es el Sol, Faites un Voeu, and Americanas, continue to explore the space between material presence and something harder to name.At the center of her recent practice is El Habitáculo, a solar-powered installation conceived as a sacred shelter and a kind of living antenna. Through light, geometry, and the prism as a vessel, Clara creates spaces for contemplation—places where the physical world becomes a point of departure for wondering about something much larger.
During her residency at El Ganzo, Clara de Tezanos brought El Habitáculo to life: an interactive installation conceived as an antenna for connecting with the universe through light, nature, and vibration.At its center is the prism—a shape capable of receiving sunlight and revealing its spectrum, transforming a simple encounter with the sun into something almost otherworldly. The structure contains and concentrates this light, creating a space that feels at once shelter, instrument, and portal.For Clara, the prism becomes a metaphor for existence itself: a synthesis of the mysteries we can see and those that remain just beyond our understanding. Activated by the sun, El Habitáculo invites its visitors to pause, observe, and experience light not simply as illumination, but as a force with its own presence.The work is ultimately an exercise in wonder. It asks us to step inside, look outward, and spend a little time with the immensity of what surrounds us. At El Ganzo, where the sea, sky, art, and landscape are constantly in conversation, El Habitáculo found a particularly fitting place to become an invitation to reconnect—with nature, with stillness, and perhaps with something we don't quite have words for yet.
