Chicharras (Cicadas): Altar for Return 

This altar brings together revitalised practices, inherited rupture, and relational repair through a deeply personal act of return. The chicharras (cicadas) appear here for the first time, marking cycles of rupture, memory, and survival that move across the exhibition. For me, they carry the sound of Ataco, childhood visits with my father, and a longing for land fractured by displacement, schooling, and colonial violence. That rupture lives in many of our families, often carried through alcohol, a medicine turned poison under colonisation. At the centre, the skull and cicadas sit among feather crowns by Isaac Te Awa, horsehair adornment by Colombian artist Marta Moncayo, Maya adornment by K’iche’ artist José Luis Fernando Morales, and textiles from El Salvador and Chiapas, holding grief alongside care.

Each work participates in practices of revitalisation: Māori weaving and featherwork, the resurgence of Salvadoran textiles following the violence of 1932, Maya adornment techniques sustained through antique beads and coins, and handwoven pom-pom textiles by Tontón Textil, echoing Maya dress and labour. These materials do not illustrate tradition; they enact continuity. Gathered across Aotearoa and Abya Yala, the altar functions as ceremony, insisting that healing requires beauty, witnessing, and responsibility. The cicadas return throughout the exhibition, breaking silence through song.