Lukas Avendaño

In the Isthmus of Oaxaca, Binnizá: Guardians of the Clouds celebrates Indigenous creativity and storytelling, revealing how these traditions preserve cultural heritage for future generations.

Lukas Avendaño is the most important artist of the Muxe community. Poetry, dance and anthropology are the tools they use to enunciate and express themself. Since May 10, 2018, their brother Bruno mysteriously disappeared in Tehuantepec, Oaxaca. In Mexico, Bruno is one of 40 thousand missing persons. For Lukas, the search for Bruno has become their greatest utopia.

Filmed on location at the San José del Pacífico sierra in Oaxaca, Tierra addresses, through an experimental aproach, issues such as the destruction of territory and its transformation, gender identities, ecofeminism, feminist struggles, the defense of seeds and identity within the maps and geographies of Latin America.

An abstract backdrop with enormous frames strung with ropes, sound design composed for pre-colonial instruments, and a strong collective choreography make the first large-scale dance piece by the Mexican artist Lukas Avendaño a poetic journey. Fourteen dancers and one actress imagine the origins of all life on the basis of feminine symbolism from Mexican culture. Drawing on the symbol of the snake that gives birth to itself, the ‘lemniscate’, symbol of infinity,

Being a child muxe, or Zapotec homosexual, Tino assumes the role of a woman to reach his teens, to resolve his economic situation and his past, despite social deprivation. Tino wants to achieve his dream of becoming a “quinceañera” and Queen Muxe. This is an intimate journey into a magical town of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, lost in the wild heel of Mexico, where femininity, strong women and men dressed as women prevail.