Naomi Rincón Gallardo

Opossum Resilience

Naomi Rincón Gallardo

Opossum Resilience is inspired on a series of encounters and interviews with a Zapotec female land defender. This place-based fabulation grounded in the valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, bastardizes Mesoamerican myths around four figures: a Hill, an Agave, an Opossum and Lady Reed. Lady Reed is a mythical Mixtec character who helps the opossum to cut the agave leaves in order to get its sugary alcoholic sap. Opossum Resilience overlaps the time of creation with a contemporary socio-environmental conflict around the imposition of a mining project in an Indigenous Territory. It summons the powers of festivity and inhebriation; and imagines an opossum providing an activist with the mythical powers to play dead and then revive.