ElylaMirrorring Lennger-Gallo Gallina
Live Performance at Festival Pina Praça
In collaboration with Otniel Tasman25.07.2025
Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Elyla’s film Prayer for Tending Death (2024) will also be shown as part of the screening program. It is a poetic exploration of violence, death, queer affection, and tenderness whose main character, ELYLA, is portrayed as a macho drag queen who moves between two worlds, one symbolized by a rooster within the brutal setting of a cockpit and the other world of transformation and ritual as ELYLA uses the fallen rooster as an offering. The film ends with a tableau vivant of queer and trans bodies, honoring dissidence and sisterhood.

Elyla is a performance artist and queer activist from Chontales, Nicaragua. Their earlier work critically examines the masculine lineage of the Sandinista revolution, the narratives of national identity, and the lived experiences of being a cochonx-barromestiza and queer individual in a religious, conservative society. In 2013, Elyla co-founded Operación Queer, a collective that blurred the lines between academia, art, and activism. They have developed a body of work that addresses the exclusionary implications of the concept of “mestizaje,” which has historically erased and commodified Indigenous and Black identities under the guise of inclusive rhetoric. In recent years, the artist has coined the term “barro-mestiza” to distance themselves from traditional understandings of mestizaje and to reclaim their Indigenous ancestry. This term engages in a dialogue with queer struggles and the memory of the barro, which refers to land and soil.

Curated by Ana Maria Maia and Clarissa Ximenes, in collaboration with Jo-ey Tang.