Cruce del Coyote
2025
David Stout
Cruce del Coyote is one chapter in a multi-part live cinema work titled fEVER. This larger work, part animated graphic novel, part opera, imagines the southwestern borderlands as a continuum without walls, checkpoints or limiting beliefs. A place that stretches far back and far forward in time. A land that is as alive as the many cultures who have traversed her surface, lived in her mountains and learned to speak with the plants. In this chapter, Coyote is our guide, slipping effortlessly across time and between worlds, between dimensions. Coyote watches the ancient indigenous groups walking through the desert collecting cactus, the penitentes gathering branches, star-people scanning the surroundings and other, more recent immigrants, adapting to an animate world of vibrant energetic connection.
fEVER as a whole shares allusions to rising temperatures that manifest in bodily, environmental, and social inflammation. Symptoms that coalesce in the vivid hallucinations of a fever dream state that include midnight immigration raids, urban madness, and spiritual epiphany. Cruce del Coyote is an expression of the latter, a lucid encounter with the infinite.
