Courtesy Bonny Melendez
Queens, N.Y., may be where Native Tejana Tracy Fenix currently resides, but it’s in the sacred lands of the Southwest where her life’s work is deeply rooted. In fact, Fenix recently made her way back west to visit family in her hometown of El Paso, an essential stop before she makes her way up to Santa Fe to attend the The Mud Kin Project - Lightning Score exhibit curated by Fenix (running through June 13-15; opening 5-8 pm. Free. Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St. Michael's Drive #31). The three-day immersive exhibit features six Indigenous/Latinx land-based artists, Fenix says, and includes performances, installations, artist talks and a mud brick making workshop with Albuquerque-based artist Margarita Paz-Pedro. We were lucky enough to chat with Fenix to hear more about her work and the upcoming exhibit. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Adam Ferguson)
How would you define a Public Art Eco Planner?
There's a lot of obscurity within indigeneity and the way that it shapes our social public spaces. Oftentimes, the rebuilding and the repair of ecological practices are the skill building that is dispossessed from Native folks who have a very close relationship to disposition in terms of how we were brought up. I want to activate that sense of rebuilding ancestral skills, but also the connection-building that happens across different regions of Latinx and global south people, and also the relationship that they have with each other across regions that are oftentimes shared, but not necessarily in dialogue with one another. Before I moved back to New York, I was working for the city of Los Angeles and we were working on a residency program meant to incorporate ecological practices as a central part of artistic practice. I like to think holistically about a region…site, history, place, but also the infrastructure of a place like, what are the nuts and bolts? I often think about minimalism and longevity more than anything, and it's hard to think about longevity when you're from a community that is constantly facing harassment and intimidation and targeting. Oftentimes, urban planner practices—in terms of demographics—is 80% white people. So I think it's important for urban planners to think about the levels of trauma that the community has to endure to create their community.
What exactly is a land-based curatorial mapping project? And what is the intention behind the The Mud Kin Project - Lightning Score exhibit?
It's centered around land art and land artists who identify within the relationship of being Native and/or Latinx. It's primarily the intersection of thinking through indigeneity from all cultural practices through land, art, site, specificity of a place and also the action of unifying people through a digital mapping project. I worked with my brother and his partner to create a conceptual map as part of the artistic practice, but also a digital map that allows there to be documentation of the public policies that impact and influence land artists across different states and regions throughout the US, specifically throughout the south region of the US. I have partial reluctance to share it because of the way that the presidential administration is targeting immigrants and Latinx folks, so I am trying to figure out the best way to go about that. This circle of knowledge is essential for folks to sustain their ancestral practices, but also their ecological practices. The intention behind the The Mud Kin Project - Lightning Score exhibit is to have an emotional and somatic experience around light and land. We want folks to be engaged from all the way from their feet to their eyes. So being able to get on the ground and play with the intervention installation altar that's happening. Also, to immerse themselves in the adobe installation, while also having an experiential moment around thinking through concepts of light and in the way that lightning and the monsoons shape this region.
With one of the intentions behind this exhibit being the honoring of the monsoons, what does the monsoon season mean to you personally?
Ever since I was little I’ve always been in total awe of rain, lightning and the Southwestern skies and I'm very grateful for all they give, but there's also a complexity to it all. With all the extraction and pollution of water, as well as micro plastics that we’re learning about, we want to call attention to how performance and song and light can activate our experience with the relationships to water and land and how they shape the region. Edson Reyes, a filmmaker from Los Angeles, is featured in the show and had visited New Mexico for the first time last year and he was totally consumed and captivated by the lightning. So he created a film for the exhibit to sort of activate that conversation around the cosmos and how light shapes our bodily relationship to land. That's where I got the title. I really want to emphasize the urgency of place and being in the moment. There's a lot of urgency in the exhibit and viewers need to be there so that we can do the work and activate the installation together. You have to be present right now, in this moment because that's all we can do. With the way the presidential administration is acting, we don't have time to pause, we need to really be present in how we're activating ourselves.
