Elyla (b. 1989, Chontales, Nicaragua) is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist working with video and photo performances, installations, experimental theatre, performative sculpture, and site-specific performance art interventions. Their name comes from the terms “him-and-she” in Spanish (El-y-la), reflecting their interest in recognizing gender as an apparatus of modernity that permeates life beyond the politics of the self or the colonial gender binary system. They are informed by Mesoamerican indigenous cultures and current social issues.
They identify as a “cochonx chontalli barro-mestiza.” “Cochón” is a term used in Nicaragua to refer to dissident sexualities, while “Chontalli” derives from the Nahuatl name of Elyla’s birthplace, the land of the indigenous Chontal people, and can be translated as „queer, foreigner, outsider.“ Additionally, they coined the term “barro-mestiza” to honor their relationship with land and nature (barro=mud or soil) and to acknowledge the political identity and ethno-cultural syncretism associated with the colonial concepts of “mestizaje/mestizo”. These aspects are woven into Elyla’s being and shape their artistic practice. Elyla also takes inspiration from cultural traditions such as dances, rituals, and carnivals and investigates the colonial traces embedded in them, looking to understand history while simultaneously creating pathways to new futures. Thus, the artist re-imagines new rituals and transmutes their meaning, often in conjunction with the exploration of queer politics and ethics within spirituality, collective consciousness, and the ancestral realm.
Elyla’s approach to art aims to pave a way to alternative realities of collective solidarity. In 2013, they co-founded Operación Queer, a collective that brings together artists, activists, and academics to take a public position against the different ways of exclusion and persecution of sexual dissidence in Nicaragua. Currently, they are in the early stages of creating a lifelong project alongside indigenous and queer leaders called the Community Research Center for the Decolonization of Mestizaje. These efforts result from their commitment 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.
Elyla’s work has been shown throughout Latin and North America, Canada, Europe, and Asia, at the 60th Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa, 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, and will be part of the 3rd Toronto Biennial in the fall of 2024. They have been awarded numerous prizes and residencies, including the 2024 Moving Narratives Mentorship Award Cohort 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 Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the Ortiz-Gurdián Art Foundation, KADIST videoart collection and private collectors around the world. Elyla currently lives and works in Masaya, Nicaragua, and will pursue a Master of Arts at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW in Switzerland in the Fall of 2024.
Text: Djuna Lund Llopis & Susana Turbay Botero.
