Taty Trinidad Hernandez, Indigenous Futurist & Ceramicist, invites Climate Storytelling 2075 to consider the future of the quotidian
Climate Storytelling 2075 was honored to be joined by Taty Trinidad Hernandez in May of 2025 for a conversation with Stacey A. Robinson on Indigenous and Afrofuturist storytelling.
Taty Trinidad Hernandez (they/them) is a cuir Zapotec-American ceramic artist, farmer, and cultural worker based in Los Angeles, CA and Santiago Matatlán, Oaxaca. They are a co-founding member of Ditza Futurist Collective and the founder of Lumbre Ceramics – a pottery studio specializing in cultural storytelling through clay. Their work is rooted in collective knowledge production and oral histories, affirming Indigenous inventions as high-tech, and designing indigenous futures.
After rematriating to Oaxaca in 2020, Taty went into a deep practice and learning of Zapotec farming, plant medicine, and oral history technologies from their elders. Taty frames these mediums as technologies that hold ancestral memories. These memory technologies are the tools they use to dream up queer indigenous futures and are the core principles in their art and socially engaged practice.
In 2023, they began living binationally hosting knowledge shares on maguey (agave) and its cultural significance and rituals in Oaxaca to diaspora in Los Angeles. This is when they also founded Lumbre Ceramics to be practice their culutally sustaining pedagogies.
They’ve held 20+ public workshops for intergenerational groups as a part of PST: Art & Science by Getty focusing on clay as indigenous technology and innovation.
Currently they are creating a large mosaic featuring tiles designed by community members on imagining Indigenous futures (pictured in tile 1 below).
We are pleased to share some of the insights from Taty from our dialogue. The following are quotes featured in the graphics above:
“I focus on knowledge production in Indigenous sovereignty because we are producers of knowledge, we hold so much history. We're denied access to our own knowledge because of colonial structures that still exist today - through academia, through government. This is why I share a lot about collective knowledge production and learning from each other.”
“What does liberation look like for Native people and for people who have collective histories? For me personally, that is very much based in the ordinary. There's people who make really amazing things are about the extraordinary, but I like rooting in curator Meg Onli’s idea of quotidian futures. Because people of color so often are pushed to excellence, I think about what rest looks like, and what our future look like if we're allowed to exist in the quotidian.”
“Ceramics has been around for a really long time - the oldest ceramic object is actually around 30,000 years old. So you think about creating something today that could last 30,000 years, you think about your footprint: How much stuff do I want to create? Do I fire everything I create or do I return some of it to the land, recycle it. How are we building our futures together, and especially my socially-engaged work is asking these questions to youth, asking these questions to adults, and figuring out ways that we can start moving and building together.”
“People of color have to be excellent, and perform - and when we’re performing it’s because of white supremacy. We’re boxed in these holes, because otherwise we’re criminalized. And we’re criminalized anyways, so for me the mundane allows us to look at the world with a different lens.”
“My work focuses on the quotidian as high tech. Recently, I've been thinking about plants and plant knowledge, and what other high tech things that we're currently viewing as low tech - like corn, which is engineered to be edible. My ceramic works are trying to bring the ephemeral to some everyday objects and staples, like plants.”
A storyteller asked: If someone is inspired by the wisdom and knowledge of a group that they don’t belong to, what is your idea of the right way to acknowledge that work if it inspires you?
“It’s important to cite your lineage of thought, whether that’s political learnings, cultural learnings: over-cite, more than you need to. There are a lot of black and Indigenous intellects that they want to share with the world and it’s a matter of sharing their ideas as their ideas.”
“I did a performance piece video on land that is the site of a former plantation/hacienda that, after a long history and land reform, was given back to us. It makes me think about being on my homeland, all the people who've walked there, all the people who were angry there, but who also loved there, who maybe had their first kiss there, who worked there, who just had experiences on that land.
And to now, me, myself, be walking that land and have my own experience with the land and build my own relationship to it, and also commemorate everyone who else who walked on it. So for me, Indigenous futurism encompasses so much of that history, so much of that collective memory and thinking about collective futures.”
