For the past three years, I have been working with obsidian mirrors in durational performances, workshops, installations and lectures that explore the material’s history, its relation to land art and its decolonial potentials. Obsidian mirrors existed in the Americas before contact, and were brought back to Europe as fetish objects beginning in the 16th century. As a person of indigenous heritage from Mexico, my practice, grounded in research in colonial archives as well as an exploration of indigenous knowledges, uses performance to examine different ways of perceiving time and how it structures the orientation and phenomenology of our bodies, as well as their inscription in systems of conquest and resistance.

According to an Aztec conception of temporality, the future is behind us, since it remains unseen and imperceptible, whereas the past is in front of us as what is visible and already known. This bodily concept of time transforms the meaning of the future, and challenges Eurocentric and Western ideas of progress, modernity and the linearity of time. The obsidian mirror was used as a tool of divination, since its dark polished surface shows you the future reflected behind you.

This project began with a commission by Art Bridges Foundation to respond to Double Non-Site California, Nevada, by Robert Smithson, a work in which the artist centered obsidian. Variations of Tezcatl Smoking Mirrors have been performed at Syracuse University Museum of Art, Johnson Museum of Art, Mass MoCA, MCA Chicago, the National Theater Academy in Malmo, Sweden (lecture-performance in collaboration with theorist Rebecca Schneider), the park Avenue Armory, and most recently at the opening of the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale of artist Jeffrey Gibson.