Martín Rodríguez

NOUS/OTRXS

Installation

Transmitters, radios, soil, water, seeds

The installation NOUS/OTRXS engages ancestral knowledge through a speculative gesture of care by cultivating Mesoamerican heirloom seeds alongside crops native to Québec. Accompanying the seeds are radio broadcasts from a sonic archive of migrant songs, stories, and sounds. In the middle of the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, an ad-hoc radio station houses a garden using a traditional farming method known as a Milpa alongside Chinampas (Aztec floating permaculture gardens). This gesture of sowing ancestral seeds in the soil of a distant territory is a parable for the Latin-American experience in so-called Canada, which often goes untold. 

“The future belongs to those who cultivate cultural sensitivities to differences and who use these abilities to forge a hybrid consciousness that transcends the “us” versus “them” mentality and will carry us into a nos/otras position bridging the extremes of our cultural realities, a subjectivity that doesn’t polarize potential allies.” - Gloria Anzaldúa

This garden puts into action a process through which community-sourced aural histories can entangle with non-human plant life and live on in a new form. Via an antenna planted in the soil, the plants are nurtured with a steady dose of water, light, and radio waves. Generating new seeds from the plant/radio relationship, the process opens avenues for interspecies and intergenerational knowledge transfer, connecting histories and alternative chronologies. This gesture works to create a relationship between territories and their inhabitants while imagining a future together.

Through the fusion of ancestral agricultural practices, radio transmissions, and community engagement, NOUS/OTRXS nurtures a living archive that bridges past and future, land and migration, human and non-human life. By planting a Milpa in the SBC gallery, this project reclaims forgotten histories and reimagines the Latin-Canadian experience in a new light. As the milpa flourishes, it embodies resilience, care, and interconnection—offering a poetic and political meditation on migration, labor, and the enduring wisdom of Ancestral knowledge. In doing so, NOUS/OTRXS not only transmits sound but also cultivates a future where histories take root and grow anew.