MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ​

11.09 - 01.11.2025

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​​​"The future belongs to those who cultivate cultural sensitivities to differences and who use

these abilities to forge a hybrid consciousness that transcends the 'us' versus 'them' mentality

and will carry us into a nos/otras position bridging the extremes of our cultural realities,

a subjectivity that doesn’t polarize potential allies."

 Gloria Anzaldúa

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NOUS/OTRXS is a living exhibition by Xicanx* artist Martín Rodríguez, based in Montreal, who cultivates a space of resonance and resilience by weaving together ancestral agricultural practices, sound archives, radio transmission, and community engagement. 

At the centre of the gallery, a garden inspired by traditional Mesoamerican farming methods, such as the Milpa and Chinampas — floating gardens rooted in Aztec permaculture — cultivated with heirloom seeds from the Global South: corn, chilli, beans, squash, tobacco, and more. These seeds are accompanied by stories and songs broadcast through an ad hoc radio** integrated into the installation: copper antennas planted in the soil feed the plants with waves, nourishing both vegetal life and the memory of migrant communities. Shaped like an Ojo de Dios, a woven ritual object from Indigenous Mexican cultures, these antennas become spiritual transmitters, symbolizing the return to Aztlán, the mythical homeland of the Nahua peoples, claimed as their own by the Chicana community, and weave a connection between territory and cosmovision.

Through this gesture, NOUS/OTRXS offers a critical and poetic reading of migration, often reduced to its economic function of labor optimization. Here, migrant bodies are not anonymous. They carry stories, memories, and ways of inhabiting the land. The garden becomes a living archive, a space for listening, a site where knowledge is transmitted across geographical, cultural, generational, or interspecies borders.

Every year, thousands of seasonal agricultural workers from Latin America arrive in Canada to work the land. These women and men — often of Indigenous and rural origin, from communities such as the Maya, Kaqchikel, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aymara, Quechua, among others — embody a living memory of the land, an ancestral knowledge that continues to nourish this territory, despite their erasure from Quebec's and Canada's cultural landscape. As Canadian migration policies consider revising, or even eliminating, certain temporary migration programs, this artistic project raises a fundamental question: How do we recognize — or render invisible — these communities' vital contributions to the country's food and cultural systems?

In this sense, the voice of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Chicana thinker and decolonial critic, guides this project by inviting us to move beyond binary logics of “us versus them” toward a nos/otras consciousness: a radical in-between space, shaped by mestizaje, tension, and possibility. It is within this crack that the exhibition takes root: a speculative space where seeds are sown like stories and acts of resilience. The seeds, like the stories broadcast over the radio, become vessels of care, gestures of attention to the forms of human and ecological exploitation.

The sound narratives heard in the space are drawn from an archive built in collaboration with Latin American migrant communities in Quebec: testimonies, work sounds, fragments of memory. Listening to them, intertwined with the sounds of the garden, creates a soundscape that invites us to locate ourselves within this living ecosystem. This project acts as a parable: sowing Mesoamerican seeds into northern soil becomes both a political and affective gesture. It challenges the place of migrants in national narratives, while highlighting the richness of the knowledge they carry. It also proposes a form of interspecies alliance, where plants, humans, memory, and territory coexist in a network of reciprocity.

By cultivating this living space, NOUS/OTRXS seeks to open a dialogue. A dialogue between lands of origin and of arrival, between generations, between humans and living beings. A dialogue that recognizes the dignity of migrant workers, while imagining with them a shared future — hybrid, sensitive, and radically interconnected.