Between Softness and Survival        

This installation brings two Indigequeer horizons into relation. A photograph by Māori artist Renati Waaka imagines a Takatāpui utopia grounded in softness, beauty, and joy. Tenderness, articulated through light and colour, becomes a method for imagining Indigequeer life otherwise. When I first encountered this work, I struggled to understand it. Coming from Kuskatan/El Salvador, where queer and trans bodies are still targeted, dismembered, and forced into exile, joy as a future felt unimaginable. That dissonance sharpened my reading of Nahua-Mestize artist ARIA XYX’s practice, which emerges from Kuskatan as an Indigequeer futurism forged through structural violence, bodily mutation, and convulsive survival. These are not opposing visions, but uneven conditions. Not all Indigenous worlds are granted the same capacity to dream. Placed together, alongside pounamu, jade, marble, and feather, this installation asks how privilege, place, and survival shape our imaginaries. The installation does not seek resolution; it sustains the tension as a necessary condition of relation. Between utopia and dystopia, softness and endurance, this space insists on relational accountability rather than comparison.