BIO
Elyla’s work has been shown throughout Latin and North America, Canada, Europe, and Asia, at the 60th Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Toronto Art Biennale curated by Miguel Lopez and Dominique Fontaine, the IX/X Biennial of Nicaragua, IX/X Central American Biennials, XII Biennial of Havana, Cuba, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYC, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá. They have been awarded numerous prizes and residencies, including the 2024 Moving Narratives Mentorship Award by the Prince Claus Fund, the Seed Award in 2021, and in 2020, an Artist Protection Fund Fellowship at Bucknell University, granted by the Institute of International Education (IIE) and supported by the Samek Art Museum.
Their piece Machete Dress received a grant from the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) 16th annual Grants & Commissions Program. Elyla’s works are part of international collections such as the The TBA21 Collection, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, MAC Panama Collection, the Ortiz-Gurdián Art Foundation Collection, KADIST Video Art Collection and private collectors around the world. Elyla currently lives and works between Masaya, Nicaragua and Basel, Switzerland pursuing a Master of Arts at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m Elyla, a cochón chontalli barro-mestiza. I was born in a small village called Villa Sandino in the Chontales department of Nicaragua.
My name El-y-la means him-and-she in Spanish. I’m interested in recognizing gender as an apparatus of modernity that permeates life beyond the politics of the self or the colonial gender binary. In Nicaragua, cochón is a term used to refer to dissident sexualities, and I speak from that space to foster an epistemology rooted in Mesoamerican localities.Chontalli is derived from the name of my birthplace, Chontales, the land of the indigenous Chontal people. It is a word of Nahuatl origin that can be translated as “foreigner, outsider." Barro means mud and speaks to our relationship with land and nature, calling for a return to earth-honouring practices. Mestizaje/mestizo is a political identity that represents an ethno-cultural syncretism resulting from colonial imposition.Cochón-chontalli-barro-mestiza is woven into my being and shapes the lenses through which I explore artmaking.
My art practice is multidisciplinary and often moves between video performances, installations, photo performances, experimental theatre, performative sculpture, and site-specific performance art interventions. My early work dealt with queering the memory of leftist Sandinista politics and in 2013
I co-created the collective Operacion Queer/Cochona, working from the limits of art, academia, and activism to intervene in the Central American region.
Methodologically, I often research the colonial traces within cultural traditions, such as dances, rituals, and carnivals to find new ways of understanding history and create pathways to boldly embedded futures. I've previously worked with cultural practices from Nicaragua like La Gigantona, El Gueguense, Torovenado, Baile de Negras, Carrera de Patos and, more recently, on the cultural phenomenon of cockfighting with a trans-oceanic research-based project between Mesoamerica and South East Asia.
I’m currently in the early stages of co-creating a lifelong project alongside indigenous and queer leaders – Community Research Center for the Decolonization of Knowledge and Mestizaje (2024). I’m committed to researching how decolonial reflections can lead to a community-based anti-colonial praxis in Central America while staying in critical dialogue with international networks of solidarity.