Melanie Smith & Patricio Villarreal

Tixinda

The artists spent time with a Mixtec community in Oaxaca following an age-old, seasonal ritual, in which elderly members of the village make the journey to the coast to find the tixinda, the elusive purple sea snail, in order to ‘milk’ its extraordinary purple dye in a gentle action that does no harm to the creature. The film is an elegy to the act, as both the ancestral knowledge and the snail are facing extinction under the pressures of climate change and tourism.

Part of Learning from the Land at The Whitaker.