about AJAR

Art & Design, Eliana Pérez 2026
Text, Josh Klatt

Box Set including:

Jacquard tapestry, cotton yarn, 80” x 60”
Screenprint on nylon tent fabric, 48” x 33”
Bound archival pigment prints on Canson cotton rag paper, 18” x 14”

AJAR is a pictorial recounting of the historic migration event through El Tapón del Darién, from 2021 to 2024, when over 1.2 million migrants from 100 different countries undertook the perilous hike through this narrow land mass that connects North and South America.  AJAR is Pérez’s fourth piece probing the intractable problems that plague her home country of Colombia, calling out extractivist capitalism and its victimization of the most vulnerable.

The central component of AJAR is the large tapestry, a 21st century version of fiber art story telling.  Pérez, a Colombian native, is inspired by the weaving and embroidery in her Andean neighbors’ Paracas textiles (300 BCE), the linear narratives of the Bayeux Tapestry (1070 CE) and Afghan war rugs (1979-present).  Working with a digital toolset she outputs to a Jacquard loom, embracing the restrictions of low resolution and truncated color palette to repurpose and subvert this typically industrial production path.

For the displaced migrants, many of whom are Roman Catholic, the journey is a pilgrimage.  Hinting at standard church fixtures depicting the Passion cycle and the Stations of the Cross, Pérez loops the burdened, persecuted migrants around the perimeter of the tapestry, moving from one obstacle to the next.  Like the elements woven into an Afghan war rug, threats and trauma are cataloged in the design: treacherous topography, extreme weather, venomous ants, bandits, dead bodies.

The book’s text is screenprinted on the nylon fabric panels of a worn and deconstructed tent.  Along the migration route, tents are ubiquitous.  For those with the resources to rent one at a campsite, the tent is a source of comfort and shelter.  For others, it’s a makeshift morgue where the dead body of a family member would be piled in a desperate attempt at dignified interment.  And for others, the tent is the place they would be raped by one of the predatory gangs that crossed their path.

AJAR text

South America’s 7 million square miles dangle off of its northern continental sibling by an inhospitable thread of land: a 70 mile-wide sliver of mountainous jungle known as El Tapón del Darién (The Darien Gap).  This dense rainforest of rocky ravines, steep mountains, and fast-flowing rivers covers the border area where Colombia meets Panama and extends into both countries.  Anyone or anything moving from one continent to the other must pass through this nearly impenetrable chokepoint in the wilderness. Between 2021 and 2024, more than 1.2 million migrants crossed here in an attempt to escape the hardship of their own countries, seeking opportunity and safety someplace else.

During a week-long, 40 mile trek, migrants must scale mountains, cross rapids, survive flash floods and mudslides, avoid dengue and malaria, all while being smothered by unrelenting heat, humidity and rain.  The trail is lined with dead bodies, the result of heart attacks, disease, drownings and violence.  With virtually no access to medical care, even minor injuries can be fatal.

By 2020, despite its hazards, this path became a popular migration route, and people from over 100 different countries began arriving to roll the dice on a trip north.  Initially, surviving the natural elements was the hard part.  But the local people took notice: selling stuff to migrants (food, lodging, guides) could be a profitable business.  By the end of a four year period, migration profiteers would be extracting millions of dollars a month from desperate and impoverished travelers, mostly under threat of violence.

Some of these profiteers were legal organizations like the “non-profit” Fundación Nueva Luz del Darién, which raked in $300,000 daily during peak migration flows.  They sold a compulsory $170 “travel package” for access to their monopolized route, with part of that fee going to the militarized drug traffickers, Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC) aka El Clan del Golfo.  Failure to pay the fee was considered stealing from the AGC, who would extract their tribute in other ways, often by requiring the migrant to carry drugs.  At the Panama border, where the AGC’s presence diminished, small informal gangs of rapists and killers filled the vacuum.  If a migrant had anything of value left at this point in the journey, these bandits took it.

Like attendees at an amusement park, paying customers got color coded wristbands indicating the level of service they purchased.  Paid, uniformed guides employed by Nueva Luz shepherded groups from camp to camp where tents or hammocks could be rented.  For the right price, porters would carry your bags, your children, even an injured family member.  In the middle of the jungle, makeshift shops sold supplies, restaurants offered meals and even ice cream, but only if you could pay the exorbitant prices.  If not, you carried your own stuff and slept on the ground, hungry.

9 out of 10 migrants passing through El Tapon del Darien have their sights set on the US, and in some ways, it’s a great warm-up for American life: in both places, the mechanisms of extractivist capitalism dictate all possibilities and outcomes.  But instead of being hidden from view under dense rainforest foliage, American capitalism fleeces its subjects out in the open, a system-wide shakedown in red, white and blue.