Behind the Scenes at Bakau: Meet Mariana!

Behind the Scenes at Bakau

A lot goes on at this small company and sometimes we’re so busy strategizing for change that we forget to introduce ourselves! In this series, we’re inviting you to meet our amazing team and learn about what drives them in their passion for justice.

About Mariana Trujillo-Lezama

Executive Assistant & Creative Coordinator

Mariana (pronounced mah•ree•anah) is a South American multidisciplinary artist, based and creating work on ancestral and occupied lands of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nations colonially known as Vancouver, British Columbia.

With a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University, the artist’s practice is greatly based on introspection; exploring personal and collective identity politics through performance, printmaking, painting and collage both analogue and digital. Simultaneously, the artist has developed a written practice, informed by her training in social sciences, gender studies, and the observation and interrogation of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas, specifically in Colombia and Canada.

Mariana is a committed advocate for racial and climate justice, equality, and social change through the assertion of continental Indigenous Sovereignty, service to local and South American community leaders and organizers, fundraising, accountability and art.

Mariana loves:

Bunnies
South and Central America
Disrupting the status quo
Dancing
Waffles

5 Big Questions

WHO, WHAT OR WHERE IS HOME FOR YOU?

Home for me is the places I inhabit – spiritually and physically – and in the reminiscence of the people of those places. As an immigrant, for a long time I felt my home was nowhere; now I feel like my home is everywhere. I am my home. My home is the Andean mountains of the Abya Yala and the memory of the songs the birds sing all year long at sunrise.

WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO LAND AND WATER?

I think about my relationship with the land and the water all the time – I don’t think they are different from each other. I believe we are the land we go back to, the dirt that the people we love go back to, and then the dirt gives us the food that we eat. We are the water in the atmosphere, the air processed by leaves – nature and the land and the territories we are on and the territory I was born, are territories that are blessed and rich in so many ways, and I don’t think we can ever be separated from the that.

I understand that we’ve been told, and are told all the time, that we are different from the earth, from the land. That our body is different and other than it. But I believe that the more we understand how we are inherently connected to it and to one another, the more we'll become to bare the heaviness of the consciousness of our existence.

WHAT IS A PIECE OF ART, LITERATURE, FILM, OR MUSIC THAT CHANGED YOU IN SOME WAY?

All About Love by bell hooks for sure, Femme in Public by Alok Vaid-Menon, and South American music of resistance – that of Mercedes Sosa, for instance, that my father played for me and my siblings since we were children.

WHAT DOES A POST-LIBERATION WORLD LOOK LIKE TO YOU?

Imagining a free world requires so much creativity, hope, and discipline – it's really hard work but I think of Indigenous Sovereignty all around the globe; Colombia and the global South being completely free of mining and extractivism; full fossil fuel phase out; the destruction of the British empire; and the collapse of the USAs domain.