ARTIST STATEMENT

I’m 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, and I speak from this space to foster an epistemology rooted in Mesoamerican localities. Chontalli derives from Chontales, the land of the indigenous Chontal people, and comes from Nahuatl, meaning “foreigner” or “outsider.” Barro (mud) speaks to our relationship with land and nature, calling for a return to earth-honoring practices. Mestizaje/mestizo is a political identity reflecting the ethno-cultural syncretism imposed by colonialism. Together, cochón-chontalli-barro-mestiza is woven into my being and shapes the lenses through which I approach artmaking.

Through an experimental affective auto-ethnography, my work engages belief systems and cosmologies that resist anthropocentric and extractive logics underlying both colonial violence and contemporary technologies of transcendence. My practice unfolds at the edges of the knowable, where memory, myth, and imagination converge. I am drawn to altered states of being within cultural and popular practices—not as escape, but as a way to inhabit history’s wounds and possibilities differently, summoning 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-created the collective Operación Queer/Cochona, working at the intersections of art, academia, and activism to intervene in the Central American region.

I research colonial traces in cultural traditions—dances, rituals, and carnivals—to discover new ways of understanding history and to create pathways toward boldly embedded and speculative futures within spaces of collective repair. My practice has engaged Nicaraguan traditions such as La Gigantona, El Gueguense, Torovenado, Baile de Negras, Carrera de Patos, and more recently, the cultural phenomenon of cockfighting through a trans-oceanic, research-based project connecting Mesoamerica and Southeast Asia.I am currently in the early stages of co-creating a lifelong project with Indigenous and queer leaders: the Community Research Center for the Decolonization of Knowledge and Mestizaje (2024). I am committed to exploring how decolonial reflections can lead to community-based anti-colonial praxis in Central America, while remaining in critical dialogue with international networks of solidarity.