Migueltzinta C. Solís

Embodied, interactive, and immersive experiences are at the forefront of my radical pedagogy, performance, and community engagement practices. I use materials such as live performance, interactive installation art, moving image and sound as immersive tools with which to approach charged archives, places, and phenomena. Bringing humour, lo-fi materials, relationship building, and a carnival barker’s magic to difficult and complex topics, these happenings open portals to change and understanding. Custom designed for specific sites and invitations, I have managed creative immersive and interactive engagement projects including:
– Art carnivals
– Immersive exhibits and installations
– Publication and audio/visual production projects
– Hands-on workshops
– Preformative history lectures
– Critical site interpretation

Oracle of the Divine Thrift Store
Latitude 53, Edmonton, June 25^th 2025
role: performer
Curated by Cindy Baker, Oracle of the Divine Thrift Store performed divination as queer social practice. Querents consulting the Oracle were led through a series of interlocking divinatory activities using oracular devices foraged and assembled from regional thrift stores. This low-fi divinatory “machine” gently, collaboratively, and playfully guided querents through unexpectedly meaningful conversations about their personal lives, troubles, and aspirations.

–tzintlán: the world’s first postcolonial theme park (visits Blackfoot Territory)
Fort Whoop Up, Lethbridge, May 11^th – May 13^th 2023
roles: artist, project lead, creative director
A creative take-over of the Fort Whoop-Up whisky trading post and RCMP station replica which humorously questioned how we understand history and place. This temporary collaborative artspace featured works by participants in the University of Lethbridge’s LandMarks course (Spring 2023) and works from graduate students as well. Using tropes from themed environments such as carnivals, theme parks, world fairs, and dime museums, the three-day extravaganza made themes of decolonization, Indigenous futures, and critique of museum spaces, carceral systems, and the white cube accessible to wide range of audiences. It included live music, performance art, art exhibits, carnival games, Tarot readings, self-guided bicycle tours, a virtual rollercoaster, and a rare opportunity to see the world’s last living white Tyler.

BuffaloMech: Creative Indigenous Technologies for Survivance
funded by the SSHRC Exchange Award
Galt Museum & Archives Akaisamitohkanao’pa / Fort Whoop Up/University of Lethbridge, January 2024 – September 2024
roles: grant PI, project lead, mentor, curator

Housed in the Center for Indigenous Arts Research and Technology (CIART,) BuffaloMech was a creative research development and mobilization initiative intended to equip a team of undergraduate Indigenous student artists with the technical, professional, and academic skills needed to present, exhibit, self-curate, and share their creative works and artist profiles. Five students pondered the question, “What is Indigenous technology?” drawing from their lived Blackfoot, Cree, and mixed experiences to create interdisciplinary works and arts research which were presented to the public. Bringing together traditional and contemporary creative technologies, the BuffaloMech project rooted itself in political and cultural themes of Indigenous survivance, belonging, land relation, and futurism. As part of the project, a short film was made to document the project and exhibition. The film was featured as part of the Lethbridge Independent Film Festival in 2024.

Speaking SAGE: SAGE Clan x Indigenous Art Studio
funded by the SHRCC Indigenous Research Engagement
University of Lethbridge, December 2023 – December 2024
roles: grant PI, project lead, event organizer, instructor

A collaboration with SAGE Clan, a grassroots organization supporting street-based peoples, this project sought to bring attention to the reasons why Indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by issues of displacement and addiction in Treaty 7 territory. The project fostered reciprocal relationships between street entrenched community members, SAGE Clan members, and University of Lethbridge students. SAGE Clan members visited classrooms and campus-based groups, promoting awareness and education on the lived realities and structural inequities affecting unhoused people and those living with addiction. Students had the opportunity to take virtual opioid poisoning training as part of the project. The project hosted two major events in Lethbridge’s downtown core, bringing food, supplies, and warmth to people enduring the cold in Galt Gardens. Students in fine arts classes contributed illustrations toward a coloring book titled “Art is Medicine.” As part of a book binding workshop with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, students had the opportunity to bind and distribute 100 copies of the coloring book especially designed to encourage creative expression for street-based communities.

Death: The Ride
Waking Death Arts & Culture Series
Casa Art Gallery, Lethbridge, October 7^th, 2023
roles: artist
A blend of virtual simulation and live performance, this “death simulator” experience guided participants through a thoughtful, lyric, and humorous narrated ride. Participants “rode” a virtual dark ride, while the Yolo Xolo spoke to them of prehispanic death cosmologies and stories.

The Gay Villain Rides Again: The History of a Queer Biker (This is Not a Bike)
Queer/Disrupt, U.K. (Virtual), April 16^th 2021
role: artist
An augmented archive presented as a factual historical research lecture, this performance combined doctored archival images, academic satire, and virtual performance.

Landscape is My Sir
Penny Gallery and surrounding, Lethbridge, May 25^th – June 8^th 2019
role: artist
This body of work aims to construct a cosmology of desire and perversity, which functions to unsettle existing narratives of power and landscape. A composite immersive experience built of performances, installations, videos and weavings, this body of work performs a collision of rural, colonial and queer imaginaries. The works consider relationships between land and gender, western expansion and the imaging of colonially occupied territory. The work introduces a performance persona, Chico California, a (probably trans) homosexual leatherman seeking to engage in erotic relationships with space, site and inanimate objects. Chico California, a mysterious semi-feral misanthrope, makes his provocative, problematic and un-procreative advances on Nature and Landscape discoverable, presenting the onlooker with opportunities to encounter him in his habits of desire.