EL HUB

‘Tlatoani’ is an installation by Meghan DeRoma honoring the Ahuehuete tree, or Montezuma Cypress (as it is know in the modern western world) that has been named ‘El Arbol de la Noche Victorioso’. This tree was over 500 years old, and held historical and cultural significance when it was burned down in 1960s. This tree is an intrinsic part of the history of the land where its stump now sits, the land of the Mexica and now the land that holds La Ciudad de Mexico. The death of this tree occurred because of human influence, adjacency, infringement. It was not only a loss of ancient wisdom, but the loss of a keeper of time and a guardian of the land, and the death of an ecosystem of plants and animals and insects and arachnids. 

Tlatoani is a word in Nahuatl that means ‘the one who speaks’, and was the term applied to the ruler of the time. Montezuma was a tlatoani. In this naming of this work, the voice of this being is exhalted to the highest position. As humans on a planet in pain, developing the sensitivity to listen to the trees is pertinent in our survival as a species. 

This work is part of an ongoing series concerning urban ecology called ‘Ghost Trees’ or en Español, ‘Arboles Fantasmas’ that are monuments honoring tree beings that have passed away by the hand of or proximity to man. These ghost like visages of the tree that once stood bear details of the ecosystem of beings that inhabited the tree when it was alive. The hope is that by honoring a tree as we would a  relative, we will begin to see the trees as our kin, and protect them as we would our own.