MUTŌ:

Temple for trans-planetary regeneration

“We will rest. We will regenerate.“ - The Regenerators

What becomes possible when imagination is valued as a public good, and multispecies others are revered, recognised for their regenerative teachings, and become the guides for futures of repair?

MUTŌ: Temple for trans-planetary regeneration is an experiential future, presented as a part of the 8th Annual Trans Pride program in Sao Paulo Brazil. Created for an exclusively Trans audience, Muto is homed in a future defined by repair, remediation and collective transformation. In this future, the temple space is one of many created to protect the sacred labour of collective dreaming and to offer community space to practice collapse and reworlding across micro and macro scales.

These temples were created by ancestors called the Regenerators , those humans who recognised collapse as invitation to metamorphosis, and looked to planetary teachers to help navigate and flourish between worlds. Learning from Monarch butterflies, and weaving human and pollinator survival together, the Regenerators created sacred spaces that mirror the lifeways of Monarchs, providing safe spaces to dissolve and rebuild. Because this future celebrates transition and transformation as necessary for collective survival, the trans community are celebrated as leaders in scared service, carrying intergenerational knowledge of ongoing change amidst uncertain terrains.

Within the temple, participants slip into the spaces between selves, bodies, and worlds, reaching towards new horizons of imaginable and seemingly impossible. Their dreams are gathered into prayers, transmitted into sacred artefacts, and placed upon a cumulative altar. Because transformation is an essential skill in creating planetary futures, all participants in the temple were remunerated for their labor in dreaming, dissolving and regenerating. Guided by temple attendants, two hundred dreamers entered the temple in Sao Paulo, becoming part of the Regenerators’ legacy, departing with milkweed seeds, the sole food source for the declining Monarch butterfly population in the present, to distribute across São Paulo in an effort to seed new, interspecies horizons of care in the now.

MUTŌ was developed in collaboration with the generous support of a local butterfly sanctuary and a large team of trans and queer artists from São Paulo. A short documentary on the making of the work, including interviews with collaborators, is available here.

Worlding, Concept, Design: Audax M. Gawler

Curator: Lyon Ror (Pri Bertucci)

Production: Instituto SSEX BBOX
Dramaturgy: Stephanie Speirs
Scenography: Cia Incendiária and Studio Ellias Kaleb
Installation Coordination: Alzi Incendiário
Architecture: André Charpinel
Executive Project and 3D: Nena Alava
Rope and Suspension: Mariana Rodeso
Projection: Lui Cavalcante
Lighting Design: Ana Paula Coelho
Sound Design: Justine Walsh
Voice: Viridiana
Graphic Design: Marilena Hewitt, Audax. M Gawler & Cleu Oliver
Management and Production: V Branco and Chris Martins
Artistic Assistance: Daniela Marques
Technical Assistance: Matheus Bohnenstengel

Temple Attendants:
Nova Buttler, Gustavo Nascimento, Lai Borges Ferreira, Ynã Oru Florydo, Tell Barbosa Ferreira Santos, Coco, Marcele Selva, Sial Bertoni de Freitas, Anderson de Oliveira, and Marcela Futuro