Opossum Resilience
2019
Video HD. 16’02"
Opossum Resilience is inspired on a series of encounters and an interviews with female land defender and lawyer Rosalinda Dionisio. 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. This third part of the trilogy summons the powers of festivity and inebriation; and imagines an opossum providing an activist with the mythical powers to play dead and then revive.
Directed, scripted and edited by:
NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO
Hill:
LUIS ENRIQUE GARCÍA
Agave:
CHICHIS GLAM
Lady Reed:
DIANA GÓMEZ
Opossum:
NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO
Cinematography and camera:
MASHA GODOVANNAYA
Photo documentation:
CLAUDIA LÓPEZ TERROSO
Electronic Sound Effects:
ENRIQUE ARRIAGA
Direct Sound:
KONK BALAM DÍAZ
Voice-over Hill:
CLAUDIA LÓPEZ TERROSO
Voice-over “I dreamt about the naguales”:NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO
SONGS
“OPOSSUM”
Lyrics: NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO
Music: FERNANDA GUADARRAMA
Vocals: PAULINA JIMÉNEZ
Jaranas (small guitars): OLIVER MARTÍNEZ KANDT and FERNANDO GUADARRAMA
“FERMENTED, ADULTERATED, HYPER-FERTILIZED”
Lyrics: NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO
Music and vocals: CHICHIS GLAM
“ROSY”
Lyrics: NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO
HipHop: DOMA FT YADHI BOZ
Props: NAOMI RINCÓN-GALLARDO
Opossum Mask: LA MASKARERÍA OAXACA
Seamstress: MAYRA ANGÉLICA CERNAS
Lighting: JAKOB AGUILAR
Opossum Resilience was produced with the support of FWK/ Peek/ Dis/possession:
Post-Participatory Aesthetics and the Pedagogies of Land and Parallel Oaxaca