...Taking traditional cockfights in Nicaragua and Indonesia as their starting point, the works included in the exhibition explore transnational and transoceanic South-South connections, seeking to articulate, in the artist’s words: “a pathway for trans-border anticolonial queer solidarity.” Both films bring together human, animal and plant life, harnessing an interspecies awareness, building upon connections that extend beyond the immediate. The chicken is a perfect example in this sense, since the species originated in Southeast Asia and was brought to the Abya Yala by Dutch and Portuguese slave traders. Recent research however shows that Polynesian travelers had in fact brought the birds to the Pacific Coast of the soon-to-become ‘New World’ at least a century before Columbus’ arrival. This story of multiple origins and intercultural exchange enables Elyla to establish a trans-Pacific kinship, countering dominant Eurocentric narratives, by-passing 1492.

There is something both rebellious, and curative about these processes, where the aim is to build community, to hone in one’s strength. These are storiesborne out of struggle, have no doubt, but they are meant to also soothe and nourish, to bring some sense of ease, and to enable alternate futures, a queer utopia. As beautifully expressed by José Esteban Muñoz, we can “feel it [queerness] as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” “[...] queerness,” he continued, “exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” Yet that future might already be here. Elyla’s work articulates queerness in an active sense, going beyond its ideality, always becoming while also “palpable,” since it already exists in the popular realm, resoundingly alive, “en la calle,” on the street, where it has survived, and thrived against all odds. The task of the queer body, what it might accomplish through healing, Elyla explains, is precisely that act of transmutation, countering violence, reactivating memory through gesture, ritual, performance and dance.

These works are connected to Elyla’s long-term research into ancestral communal practices from their home region of Chontales and from the Pacific Coast of the territory referred to as Nicaragua, exploring performance and ritual through their popular manifestations and at the intersection with queerness, seeking to activate an anticolonial and decolonial praxis. The cock, observed through its potent associations with uninhibited masculinity, becomes the symbolic and formal device through which a quasi-alchemical process is activated whereby gender and societal norms are subverted. An “alquimia marica,” as expressed by the artist, a means to transmute matter and convert violence into pleasure, aggression into affection, hatred into love. It is no accident, of course, that such gestures are deemed necessary in a context that has been ridden by violence, inter-generationally. And, as Elyla shows, it has been specific bodies, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, female identifying, queer and non-binary, that have suffered the brunt of its force. Gender norms were strictly regimented within colonial regimes, and remain a root cause for systemic violence perpetrated against dissident bodies, unruly individuals, shunned by society...

—Ileana L. Selejan