Futuros Fugaces from Fernando Martí explores questions of reclaiming Latinx ancestral traditions and “reimagining these practices for a contemporary urban culture, the significance of these practices to the struggles we face (gentrification, pandemic, climate change, policing), and how they inform our views of the future.” Here’s more from the artist at JustSeeds.org:
Futuros Fugaces was a way to explore themes and relationships that have concerned me for a long time: what it means to reclaim ancestral knowledge, how we re-imagine the future, and what this looks like in the particular of the Mission/Excelsior Latinx community I’ve worked with for the last 30 years. Thanks to the SF Arts Commission for funding my first Individual Artist Grant! In imagining a Latinx futurism, the project took me in unexpected directions, beyond a more literal extrapolation of futurism, to a more mythical layering of Mesoamerican imagery as a way to connect past and future cosmic time.
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Futuros Fugaces began with a series of interviews with local Latinx activists, elders, and youth, involved in the reclamation of ancestral traditions and the imagination of survival and adaptation. As the instability of climate change and pandemic is layered over the existence under racist policing and precarity in employment and housing, our communities continue to fight with amazing resilience. New waves of climate precarity call forth new forms of cultural resistance. I’ve been privileged to be part of a community that is reclaiming food traditions, herbalism, and urban agriculture, trying to rebuild connections to a land base in a difficult urban terrain that is often not where our ancestors come from.