Rooted in Zapotec understandings of muxheidad, Bardaje reanimates a word used to enforce difference with the gestures, memories, and cosmologies it once pushed to the margins. The work emerges from a lineage that stretches linguistically from Persian barah to Arabic bardaj to Italian bardascia—a genealogy of dissent that refuses colonial definitions of gender and sexuality.

Lukas Avendaño moves within a ritual landscape of feathers, metallic paper, gold, silver, and ayoyotes, ancestral seeds that rattle with each step, summoning the sensual and the sacred in equal measure. Through movement, sound, and adornment, ash emerges as a polysemic ritual element unfolding in metaphors—a quintessential symbol of scorched earth, and of the survivors who rise from the ashes of their own bodies. Bardaje becomes a living archaeology of memory and matrilineality, where identity resists containment and vibrates through body and lineage. Neither confession nor spectacle, Bardaje is an embodied meditation on muxheidad: a third gender that defies translation and insists on its own cosmology of beauty, vitality, and becoming.