TONANTSINTLALLI

a multidimensional Mother Earth

By Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga and David Marcelino Cayetano

Opening

Thursday 28th April 6:30-8:30pm

The creative practitioners Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga, Nahua (Aztec), Chamula (Mayan), and Euskaldunak (Basque) woman and Marcelino Cayetano, Nahua-Mexika man welcome you to appreciate the multidimensional reality through a series of photographs, video and designs and from Mexico and Australia to understand the real world with its material and immaterial connections through deep listening, observation, sensation and appreciation.

This exhibition is for you to be immersed in the multidimensional world we exist in and connect with the material and immaterial. To have relationality with Tonantsintlalli – Our Madrecita Tierra. The connection with EVERYTHING.

They invite you to slow down and feel the textures, the sounds, the colours, shapes, the structures, dimensions and energies in a more detailed manner and imagine or remember, connecting the past with the present understanding the non-linear time in Indigenous worldviews.

Look at the whole, the diverse dimensions, and understand Country as a unit, the relationship of everything, how everything is interconnected through the law of relationality. Go beyond the tangible world and think about the material and immaterial together, the connection between all entities through acknowledgement of the importance of culture, language, relationships and connections.

Currently, we move towards the womb of our Mother Earth (Tonantsintlalli), since we come from her and we return to her, with her everything, without her nothing, we need to revive the learning of caring for her. The creative practitioners invite you to a live experience of the interconnections through ways of knowing and doing.

Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga. Indigenous Mexican woman with Nahua (Aztec),  Chamula (Mayan), and Euskaldunak (Basque) heritage. Desiree is a creative practitioner, collaborative and social design maker and thinker. She is Lecturer at Monash Art Design and Architecture, and Coordinator for Indigenous Higher Degrees by Research being part of Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab.

With over 14 years of experience in the design field, across disciplines including decolonising design, Indigenous design, sustainability, social, furniture and interior design, Desiree’s practice focuses on Indigenous peoples’ building of capacity and better ways of partnership, collaboration, and communication between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through design.  Desiree’s purpose is acknowledging and recognising the relationality between people and Place while privileging Indigenous knowledges, by enhancing biocultural diversity conservation and regeneration towards collaborative resilience, cultural identity pride and sustainability. 

David Marcelino Cayetano of ancestral roots Nahua-Mexika, who for more than seven years has been dedicated to audio-visual art, photography, muralism, poetry and music from the worldview of the original peoples of him. Likewise, he is a teacher of his native Nahuatl language and a promoter of traditional medicine that his grandparents inherited him. He published a book about legends regarding the nature and sacred places of the Huasteca "Kamanaltlajtolmej Xilitlan / Narratives in Náhuatl de Xilitla". Throughout his career he has documented the wisdom of his ancestors such as language, dances, medicine ceremonies, traditions, customs, etc.

He has served as a community authority in his own community with the position of Municipal Delegate, he studied civil engineering at the Regiomontana University. During his stay in Monterrey he was a producer and host of the TVRadio program “Voces Originarias” on TuVoxTV, thus he has also made murals from his ancestral worldview and is passionate about everything related to the traditional medicine of his ancestors who inherited him, as well as teaching classes of Náhuatl.

He currently makes indigenous cinema and is co-founder of the independent film production house “Bironga Films”, which has presented his audio-visual works in the National Cinema, National Mask Museum, Institute of Anthropological Research, National School of Languages, Linguistics and Translation of UNAM, among other cultural and academic spaces.

Image credit: Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga, In Lak’ech, 2022