A printmaking workshop Led by River Garza, assisted by Kenneth Lopez
As a reflection exercise with Mercedes Dorame’s installation Pulling the Sun Back – Xa’aa Peshii Nehiino Taame, participants will create custom prints by thinking of home, memory, and futurity making actionable a practice of land acknowledgment. Participants will be invited to walk around the park area near Mercedes and Liliana’s installation, learn about our plants relatives and use both the structure and plants as inspiration to create their prints.All the participants will be provided the necessary materials and will be guided with the final printing process.
Pulling the Sun Back – Xa’aa Peshii Nehiino Taamet is a site-specific installation by Mercedes Dorame inspired by the three elements of Tongva community structures, intertwining the traditional Tongva Kiiy (home), Shyee’evo (healing space), and Yovaar (ceremonial space). This structure imparts a cosmology of possibilities: how we interact as a communal collection of souls within new sites of meaning and re-imagining new futures rooted in the landscape of Tovaangar (Los Angeles). The movement between time and space creates a continuum of Native existence, highlighting vertical and spiraling pathways of existence throughout time, such as that between the land and sky. By engaging multi-planar sites of meaning, this project aims to break linear understandings of people, knowledge, space and time.