Hosted by the experimental school of Art and Technology, Materia Abierta, The Rise of the Coyote was an invitation to return back to Earth. Looking at the intersection between Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous technologies, plant intelligence, and Futurity, the program included talks, lectures, seminars, and workshops with: Calpulli Tecalco, Black Quantum Futurism, Paula Gaetano Adi, Laboratorio Lacustre, Michael Marder, Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Mujeres de la Tierra, Pedro Neves Marques, and Fernando Palma Rodríguez.

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.

Situated in the south of Mexico City, the program was developed from processes rooted in the Milpa Alta and Xochimilco territories. Historically, these territories have been a refuge for Indigenous knowledge and shelter an enormous biocultural diversity. We were committed to listening to local community members and social organizations that fight day to day for social justice, environmental equity, and land sovereignty. The people who live in Milpa Alta and Xochimilco, prominently of Nahua descent, are incomparable examples of self-organization and struggle against the precariousness derived from phenomena such as industrial gentrification, contamination of the subsoil, the eradication of native languages, forced displacement, and the extraction of natural resources. The program was designed to provoke collective work and initiate complicity with local groups that inhabit, build, and defend these places through ancestral knowledge and care.

The program was developed by Materia Abierta with the support from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in coordination with Cultura UNAM, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Casa del Lago UNAM, and Cátedra Extraordinaria Max Aub, Transdisciplina en Arte y Tecnología.

Read Guillermo Canek García’s reflection “From These Dark Mirrors of the World: “The Rise of the Coyote,” Materia Abierta Summer School. Images courtesy of Enrique R. Aguilar.