ARTIST STATEMENT

I am Elyla, a cochón-chontalli-barro-mestiza, born in the small village of Villa Sandino, in the Chontales department of Nicaragua.

My name, Elyla, means “him-and-she” in Spanish. In Nicaragua, cochón is a term used for dissident sexualities; I speak from this position as a site of embodied knowledge and resistance. Chontalli derives from Chontales, the land of the Chontal indigenous people, and comes from Náhuatl, meaning “foreigner” or “outsider”—a reminder that processes of othering in Mesoamerica predate European colonization. Barro (mud) speaks to my relationship with land, materiality, and ancestral memory, calling for earth-honoring practices grounded in care and reciprocity. Mestizaje is not an identity I celebrate, but a colonial condition- a political and epistemic structure imposed through violence and erasure. Together, cochón-chontalli-barro-mestiza names a situated grammar of knowing -a way of sensing, relating, and making-woven into my being and shaping how I approach artmaking as a practice of tension, listening, and re-existence.

I do not anchor my practice in static identity categories such as “Indigenous artist” or “mestiza artist.” My work emerges from the contradictions produced by coloniality and unfolds from within those tensions rather than resolving them. Mestizaje, in my practice, is not a myth of origin nor a bridge to inclusion; it is an ongoing condition that organizes bodies, labor, memory, and access to visibility across Mesoamerica. I work within this fracture to imagine other forms of relation and continuity.

Through an experimental affective auto-ethnography, my practice engages belief systems and cosmologies as epistemic practices, resisting the anthropocentric and extractive logics that underpin both colonial violence and contemporary technologies of transcendence. My work unfolds at the edges of the knowable, where memory, myth, and imagination operate not as metaphor, but as modes of knowledge production.I engage altered states of being within cultural and popular practices not as escape or mysticism, but as embodied strategies for inhabiting historical wounds and political possibilities differently- activating ways of knowing that have been silenced or exiled by rationality, modernity, and coloniality. My early work explored queering the memory of leftist Sandinista politics. In 2013, I co-founded the collective Operación Queer/Cochona, working at the intersections of art, academia, and activism to intervene in the Central American region.

My research traces colonial residues within cultural traditions-dances, rituals, and carnivals- not to represent them, but to examine how power, memory, and resistance are encoded in collective practice. This includes long-term engagements with Nicaraguan traditions such as La Gigantona, El Güegüense, Torovenado, Baile de Negras, and Carrera de Patos, as well as a transoceanic research project on cockfighting connecting Mesoamerica, and Southeast Asia. These encounters are approached through ethical listening and resonance, acknowledging the limits and responsibilities of trans-border cultural work.

My relationships with self-identified Indigenous peoples from Mesoamerica are grounded in respect, accountability, and proximity—not representation. I do not seek to stand in front of Indigenous struggles, but to walk alongside them, understanding decoloniality not as a posture but as a process of care, accompaniment, and sustained listening. I am currently co-creating a lifelong project with Indigenous and queer leaders: the Community Research Center for the Decolonization of Knowledge and Mestizaje (2024), dedicated to developing community-based, anti-colonial praxis in Central America while remaining in critical dialogue with international networks of solidarity.

This is not representation. It is a practice of re-existence- a way of naming, unlearning, and weaving worlds against the ongoing logics of colonial erasure.