South to South


Materia Abierta is a summer school on theory, art, and technology based in Mexico City.

04.08 - 27.08, 2022 

 Since the famous 1972 satellite visualization of Earth, The Blue Marble, we have engaged in a view of the planet where Earth has been treated as an image.(1) As a result, entering any physical space is like entering a virtual picture where we are only characters on a preconceived stage. Decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez also wrote about the impact that this photograph, taken by the crew of Apollo 17, has had on our experience of the planet:

This photograph accomplishes the renaissance geographers’ dream of reducing planet Earth to an object of representation; it is a moment in which the anthropocentric gaze achieves, as it were, its historical completion, the absurdity of its totality. [...] ‘‘Blue Marble’’ comes to signify the transmogrification of Earth into an object of appropriation, representation, consumption, and waste. It signifies the forgetfulness of earth as grounding precedence. (2)

Following Vázquez’s assertion about the loss of land rootedness and situatedness, The Rise of the Coyote is an invitation to come back to Earth. Alluding not only to a renewed perspective on the planet, but to a larger planetary consciousness, our return back to Earth requires entering into entangled relationalities of mutuality and co-adaption both with the multiplicities of the soil as interdependent organism and with the communities, grassroots organizations, and bodies that carry out these relationships through quotidian acts of care.

The Rise of the Coyote employs Nahua artist Fernando Palma Rodriguez’s celestial and cyborg figure, the Aztec deity Huehuecoyotl, also known as the old coyote. Huehuecoyotl has the capacity to navigate a great number of varied and contradictory worlds and ecosystems. As a trickster of infinite interchangeability, this figure stands in as an invocation of our forms of becoming allowing us to access intersubjective relations within the multiple worlds that we inhabit.

This interspecies engagement will be established in collaboration with grassroots organizations in the outskirts of Mexico City. As a collaborative practice rooted in place, the program will depart from the slopes of the Teuhtli volcano, which is the geographical border between the municipalities of Milpa Alta and Xochimilco. We will commit to listen to local community members and social organizations that fight day to day for social justice, environmental equity, and land sovereignty. Assuming themselves as cyborg coyotes, participants will enter into entangled relationalities with the territory, its soil, and its community to learn from otherworldly visualities and sensibilities.

1. W.J.T.Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
2. Rolando Vázquez, “Precedence, Earth and the Anthropocene: Decolonizing Design,” Design Philosophy Papers 4, no. 44 (2017)


previous project