Resiliencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

16:01 minutes

Naomi Rincón-Gallardo

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Resiliencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience by Naomi Ricón Gallardo is a fabulation in which four characters find themselves in temporalities that overlap Mesoamerican narratives about the creation of the world with the contemporary time of accumulation by dispossession. Together, they summon the powers of fire and joy so that the opossum conjures its ability to play dead and resuscitate in extractivist areas. The work reanimates Mesoamerican fables about time and territory where the four characters—Hill, Opossum, 9 Reed (Mixtec cave deity), and Agave/Mayahuel (Moon and Pulque Goddess)—create a space for conceptual intervention through performative action and popular music. Interpreting the realities caused by extractive projects, this video work creates an act of transmission to critically approach the deprivation of vital resources reflecting the processes of dispossession currently experienced by human and nonhuman communities in Oaxaca’s territory. The video reproduces the Mesoamerican cultural symbolism of the duality mountain/cave as ‘sacred space’ and proposes a critical theatricality wherein myths converge as epistemic resistance informing the geopolitical conflict created by the coloniality of power and capital, that is to say the structural condition of colonialism in Latin America. Seeking an alternative discourse, the artist connects the memory of landscapes with nahuales (shape-shifting sorcerers) in the myths of creation, where the guardian entities are responsible for limiting excessive accumulation. This work is dedicated to Rosalinda Dionisio, a Zapotec activist, community defender, and lawyer from the community of San José del Progreso, who has fought the environmental, social, and cultural effects caused by mining extraction projects in Oaxaca.

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Naomi Rinco?n Gallardo is a research, performance, and video artist who synthesizes tech, cuir (rather than queer), pop, and kitsch culture in her work. Through a framework that centers decolonial feminisms and cuir perspectives, her work fabricates narratives of desire, dissidence, and resilience based on Mesoamerican mythologies. Ricón Gallardo’s fables are often set against a backdrop of contemporary processes of dispossession, as well as heteropatriarchal and extractive violence in neo-colonial contexts. In her practice, Ricón Gallardo integrates her interests in speculative fiction, music videos, theatrical games, vernacular festivities, and the manual production of props and costumes. She has been a member of the cuir-feminist colective Invasorix since 2013.

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Colors:

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• natural_resource.n.01
• exploitation.n.01
• country.n.02
• mythology.n.01
• music.n.01
• folklore.n.01