TOTEM LATAMAT: CARVING A MESSAGE FOR CLIMATE

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From tree to totem: message and messenger of the multi-species community we call Life

I followed the journey of TOTEM LATAMAT from afar, since the very beginning of its 5,500 mile voyage from Mexico to Scotland. And I was honoured to have the opportunity to participate to the panel at the Crichton in Dumfries, though virtually. Now that the TOTEM LATAMAT has been laid back on the soil and started its new journey of decaying, of transforming, I wish to share some still ongoing reflections as a non-Indigenous woman, native of Italy, and as a researcher of ancient Mesopotamian cosmologies and contemporary Alpine and Indigenous American botanical narratives.

In its triumph of colours and beings, TOTEM LATAMAT is not just a totem nor an artwork, but it embodies the very essence of Life as an ever-transforming multi-species community. In such a community, humans are inhabitants of the Earth together with the other-than-human inhabitants, be they animals, plants, stones, rivers, mountains and seas. The Totem consists of a snake, the face of Death, a human person, and a basket of hummingbirds, with an eagle pervading the whole composition. The Totem is a travelling message, and the hummingbirds are its messengers. TOTEM LATAMAT calls for fighting climate change and ecological crises by celebrating the living relationships between humans and non-humans, places and communities, between words and actions. The hummingbirds and the eagle carry messages of relationality, that are the seeds of change. In order to change, TOTEM LATAMAT – which means ‘life’ in the Totonac language – reminds us of death as the regenerating and transforming force of Life. With its smiling skull, the Totem tells us that the essence of life is transformation, and that death is not its opposite, but part of it.

The life of the Totem started with the death of a living tree. The Totem was carved by the artist Jun Tiburcio from a cedar tree growing on the East coast of Mexico. The cedar’s felling was accompanied by gratitude, ceremony and prayer for the life that is taken, in a way that starkly contrasts with the massive forest destruction executed daily worldwide. The mainstream approach in felling trees rather seems to follow another story. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk ventured to kill the guardian of the sacred Cedar Forest in order to obtain timber for his palace. Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu are depicted felling the living cedars and destroying the sacred forest. An organism full of life is turned into a waste land. Their actions are impious at the eyes of the gods of the cuneiform cultures, and the myth narrates of the punishment of the king (i.e. his best friend’s death) and his following quest for immortality. Isn’t it surprising to find such narrative in an ancient text written on a clay tablet from Iraq? The roots of the dominant worldview of Anthropocene seem to sink deeply in the humanity’s past. At the same time, this myth is an ever-green warning that the world is sacred and must be respected. Also, it tells us that not all stories and worldviews should continue.

The radically different story of the Totem expresses the vital importance of celebrating life in all its faces, and that life itself is movement and change, with death as another transformation. TOTEM LATAMAT has undergone two intertwined journeys. One from Mexico to Scotland. The other is from living tree to Totem to decaying tree. The ceremony at the Crichton, where the Totem is now laid to rest, marked the honouring of when life is returned to the earth. A Totem embodying the multi-species community of life was returned to the earth, where the features of Totem and tree interpenetrate until they dissolve. The tree is itself symbol of Life: the vegetal life keeps making the world by transforming itself. By fusing themselves in the world, plants embody and express a cosmology that is meshwork, cyclicity and inter-dependence. The Totemtree recalls us to embrace the spiral of transformation that is Life, with its endless capacity of regeneration and imagination. Joining the desire of the Anishinaabe scholar, educator and activist Melissa Nelson, TOTEM LATAMAT is a call to each of us “to serve as a hospice worker to encourage the death of colonial, fragmented worldviews and practices that support separation, and act as a midwife for a new/old consciousness of justice and harmony”.

After the unsurprising failure of COP-26 in steps for de-escalating the interconnected crises facing Earth’s life, we should acknowledge that these challenging times are our last best chance to come together. As TOTEM LATAMAT forcefully reminds us, we are all swimming in these stormy waters together: we, humans, are together with all the other-than-humans inhabitants of our home, the Earth. We should re-turn and re-discover, restore and re-story and spread the messages of the hummingbirds. And we should become messengers ourselves. We have the best last chance to weave new paths and stories, that draw from old relational ways of being and of knowing the world. TOTEM LATAMAT reveals us that the time is ripe for bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous, relational and eco-centric worldviews, which radically challenge the dominant worldview of the Anthropocene, with its centuries-long and enduring process of Colonisation and Modernisation. These are practical, local, embodied, rooted and non-dualistic philosophies and spiritualities of endangered and marginalised worldviews, that understand humans as part of the environment, and embrace and enhance care for the well-being of humans and the other-than-humans.

In these unsettled and painful times of human and environmental sickness and solitude, with the hidden dangers of a comfortable-looking digital and hyper-connected world, TOTEM LATAMAT calls for a reciprocal healing: a cure through care. Care for the humans and the nonhuman inhabitants of our beautiful world, of the lands we are rooted in. Such a cure will only take place if we will all walk along the path of cooperation and reciprocity, join forces, celebrate diversities, and nurture what Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls a “polyculture of ideas”. A polyculture of ideas, knowledges, practices, stories that stands against the progressing monocultures in all levels of life. A healing and regenerating polyculture of relational and locally grounded stories, ceremonies and practices that express practical wisdom and intimate relationships with the land.

In this journey, art has a crucial role. Art emerges from and dialogues with the the Earth, from the grounded meshwork of existence. By charting and chanting the emotional routes of connections between humans and the non-human inhabitants of the world, art brings us back into communication and intimate relation with our human nature and the broader-thanhuman community pulsing with life, into the reciprocal inter-breathing of the world. Old and new stories, performances, ceremonies, artworks are all celebrations of reciprocity and respect among the different persons that dwell in and make the world. They are pivotal forces that can transform our relationship with the living world, and mend the cut that separated us from the rest of the multi-species community we call nature, while re-enchanting and re-empowering the more-than-human living world.

Anna Perdibon

TOTEM LATAMAT - CARVING A MESSAGE FOR CLIMATE premiered online on 21st January 2022, introduced by our Patron Peter Sellars. The Embassy; at the FAMA Festival in Mexico City; at the University of California, Berkeley; and in Jun Tiburcio’s Totonac community.