My involvement with research initiatives spans research creation, arts consultation, student mentorship, cultural and protocol advising, critical research ethics, program and curriculum planning, project design, administration, and management. My applied creative research practice focuses on interdisciplinary investigations of traditional and emergent technologies and materials. From leatherwork to digital formats to divination practices, my work braids together autotheoretical understandings of queer and Chicanx materials, subversive knowledge systems, and Indigenous futurisims.
Tezcatl + Tarot
In collaboration with members of H.o.-t. lab and other queer technologists, Tezcatl + Tarot is a creative research project which brings together artificial intelligence and divinatory practice to make space for intergenerational techno-decolonial self-healing and a redefinition of human/machine relation-making.
Tezcatl is a scrying technology used by many mother cultures in what is now known as Mexico. Meaning “smoking mirror” in Nahuatl, this round, polished obsidian stone functions as a portal or aperture with which to traverse our layered worlds and temporalities and see the unseen. In its opaque yet changing face, I seek out reflections of and relations with Chicanx and queer futurities via hole-based time-travelling. The technology by which Moctezuma Xocoyotzin interpolated Cortés’s invasion, Tezcatl’s ability to precalculate, witness, and envision is once again necessary in our political present of genocides, climate catastrophe, and anticolonial reclamations and resurgences. In working with Tezcatl, I engage with understandings of object sentience which assert the immeasurable intelligence of non-human matter and beings.
See the Hole Tech exhibition produced in collaboration with Nayan Velaskar.
unbelongings
Objects are sentient: leather holds memory, hats blow away and mutate into tumbleweeds, and cheap souvenirs intended for tourists become sentimental cultural symbols. This series of virtual and analog objects are part of an ongoing sculptural investigation of charro/cowboy boots and hats. These clothing objects embody both stereotypes of Mexican-ness and are true reflections of Mexican Indigenous and Iberian European material technologies, styles, and relationship to labor and land. In their treatment, the objects come to reflect states of migratory unbelonging and defiance of borders.
unbelongings: boots, 2020
A collaboration with the Concepts Have Teeth project, these digital boots tell the story of moving through an Indigenous continent that resists political borders. I have used photogrammetry to digitally re-create a pair of cowboy boots I’ve had for ten years. The boots have since been donated to an organization for displaced and street-based peoples, whose clients are primarily Native. Cowboy boots, like me, are a hybrid of Indigenous and European materials and technologies. During the early 1800s, Indigenous farm hands from different parts of “New Spain” worked for – or were enslaved by – settler ranch owners, and began adapting European style riding boots to be better suited for ranch work on their traditional territories. Overtime, these became the cowboy boots we know today.
unbelongings: western crush, 2021
This flattened cowboy hat was found discarded by a road overlooking the Old Man river valley, presumably crushed by a car. The site of complicated Indigenous, immigrant and settler relations, Lethbridge’s local narrative frequently compacts its identity to exclude historical complexities. A play on the term “Western Expansion,” Western Crush invites a reimagining of the cowboy hat, an icon of “the West,” as part of a collapsed or flattened history. The cowboy hat has a long history that embodies many migrations, and meetings of Indigenous and colonial technologies. These histories are also flattened and crushed by the idea of the cowboy as always being a white, male, heterosexual settler.
unbelongings: souvenier/recuerdo, 2022
Living far from Mexico’s national borders, it is funny to find heaps of souvenir charro hats – called “sombreros” by non-Mexicans – in thrift stores. Souvenir means “memory” or “remember” in French, recuerdo the same in Spanish. When one is far from one’s motherculture, one often ends up recycling and repurposing objects that carry stereotypical ideas of that culture in a desperate effort to not forget. This is ironic as this charro hat was made with the sole purpose of leaving Mexico as a nostalgic tourist object. Here the charro hat has been compressed into a bale of cultural “waste,” much as garbage and recycling are compressed for transportation.
Exhibited as part of Wastemakers on Cornucopia Street project.
unbelongings: bales (Mexican Food in Lethbridge Sucks), 2024
House of -tzintlán
H.o.-t. Lab is an interdisciplinary creative practices and pedagogies incubator. Currently we are ad hoc, unfunded, and unsponsored. We are a cumming-together of artists, scholars, media professionals, and creative freelancers driven by a desire to make weird decolonial queer art. You will find us loitering, masquerading, cochina-ing, serenading, and gyrating at the intersections of media art, public engagement, queer and Indigenous futurisms, and institutional critique. We specialize in creating interactive exhibitions, developing and delivering unique workshops, co-authoring experimental texts, designing site-specific/ community specific immersive experiences and arts programs. A back-to-our-cuntry-roots arts collective, we aspire to crash award ceremonies, eat all the catering at conferences, forget to save receipts, and oblige galleries to put warning labels at exhibit entrances.
https://houseoftzintlan.wordpress.com/
Other Research Involvements
Center for Indigenous Arts Research & Technology
https://lethbridgenewsnow.com/2024/06/19/fort-whoop-up-to-debut-new-exhibition-buffalomech-for-national-indigenous-peoples-day/
Role: Interim Director
December 2023 – present
Abundant Intelligences
https://abundant-intelligences.net/
Roles:
Research Collaborator, March 2023 – present
Niitsitapi Pod Arts Research & Community Consultant, January 2024 – May 2025
Niitsitapi Pod Research Co-Chair, March 2023 – December 2024
Agents of Deterioration
https://artslondon.padlet.org/lminkin/prisoners-of-love-affect-containment-and-alternative-futures-7wn1dndkhcelat49
https://imaginingfutures.world/projects/prisoners-of-love-affect-containment-and-alternative-futures/
Research Collaborator, September 2023 – February 2024
Concepts Have Teeth
https://www.conceptshaveteeth.com/
Roles:
Art & Community Engagement Consultant, December 2021 – May 2022
Artist, December 2021 – May 2022
Onkwehonwe Research Environment Indigenous Arts Institute
https://globalnews.ca/news/8120481/university-of-lethbridge-art-professor-canada-foundation-for-innovation/
Role: Senior Research Assistant, September 2019 – December 2022
IIKAAKIIMAAT Indigenous Media Research
Role: Senior Research Coordinator & Projects Lead, September 2018 – December 2022
Listening to Land, Plants & People
Role: Project Assistant, October 2021 – April 2022
Mootookakio’ssin
https://mootookakiossin.ca/
Role: Research Assistant, September 2018 – December 2019
Migueltzinta C. Solís 
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