Practice

My work braids together understandings of queer and Chicanx material practices, subversive knowledge systems, and Indigenous futurisims.

Chicanx Grimoire

Currently in its early stages, this constellation of ritual and practical creative works serve as an incubator and archive for Chicanx cultural/spiritual practice, land connection, and collective memory. Based in lived experience as a second-generation Chicanx scholar and land tender, Chicanx Grimoire is divided into “chapters” (individual works), taking the form of videos, zines, oracles cards, and acts or happenings.

Chicanx Grimoire: Limpia
Upcoming in 2026
Limpia brings together Tezcatl (obsidian mirror) scrying practice with limpia practice to heal disturbance brought on by ICE, data centers, and corporate/state surveillance. Limpia blends video documentation of site-specific acts, archival research, spellcraft, and ritual object creation. Tezcatl acts as earth’s camera: a portal and a witness. Presented as a filmic altar for a limpia, Tezcatl bears witness to cycles of colonization and liberation. It opens portals through which water, land, and Native Peoples might escape. Limpia and Tezcatl practices have endured many waves of colonization, inquisition, and political persecution, evidence they are powerful occult technologies which have helped our ancestors survive and can come to our aid now.

Hole Tech

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 timetravelling. 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 reclamation and resurgence. 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 and read a paper in WSQ which discusses Tezcatl as portals.

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/

Past 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 – December 2025

Abundant Intelligences
https://abundant-intelligences.net/
Roles:
Research Collaborator, March 2023 – February 2026
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