Artist Statement:
I seek to understand my heritage and the sound and oral traditions that have populated the Americas for millennia. Grounded in Indigenous ontologies, Latinx anthropology and Nepantla; my work investigates the sonic legacies of the Americas as a means to repair, reclaim, and reimagine temporalities of healing, while telling stories across time and space. I also gaze at the night sky, the way my ancestors did, to inquire about how to make sense of this world and ultimately connect with them and their enduring capacity to survive in us.
In reconstructing ancient sound instruments, I discover a language encoded within sound, preserving knowledge hidden in plain sight.
When I play, my body becomes a vessel for the most primal creative force, this force is not only for a human audience, but for a natural world so it may continue guiding us and softening us. With each performance, with each gesture and collaboration, I reaffirm my connection to the earth, from the first single cell to the children born tomorrow.
Through research and contemplation on pre-American instruments, I develop site-specific sonic sculptures, photographs, rituals, drawings incorporating Andean cosmology and iconographies from the dream world of my ancestors in the Pacific coast. I am interested in how the past and future coalesce in a simultaneous dimension of time/space/being that is in constant communication and tension with the present.
I imagine how sound and potential rituals can help us engage with intersectional technologies that can dismantle imperialism and ecological degradation in order to tend to the earth and heal mutually.
We must remember everything, especially those things we never knew.
ABOUT:
Koyoltzintli is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Upstate New York. She was raised on the Pacific coast and in the Andean mountains of Ecuador. Her work revolves around sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling, blending collaborative processes with personal narratives. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2019 and 2023, her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, the Parrish Art Museum, Princeton University, the Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo. She has had two solo shows at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery and a solo show at Leila Greiche in 2023. Koyoltzintli has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships, including at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, NYFA, We Women, the Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), and most recently, the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240) and included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer, former chief curator at BRIC. She is part of Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024, El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art.
Koyoltzintli has performed at venues such as the Whitney Museum, Wave Hill, Socrates Park, Brooklyn Museum, and Queens Museum. Most recently, she performed at Performance Space in NYC, curated by Guadalupe Maravilla, at Dia Chelsea for the closing event of Delcy Morelos' El Abrazo, and at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY.
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Credit: Christopher Villafuerte
At dawn, anthropomorphic flutes appear washed up in the shores, ancient objects next to gourds at my relative’s house, memories that constellate. My mother healing me from the evil eye with egg and salt, a room full of saints and santeria, bathing me with my grandmother to gain wisdom, anointing our bodies with herbs, palo santo oil and honey.
Met Mama Matilde, learned candle magic, walked the red road, blessed with a name revealed in the fire, missed the burial rituals. A teacher in the north, an apprentice in the south, I lived in the crossroads and now the world is upside down. I search for home in my body, the sounds in my ancestors’ voice. A flute speaking the language of stones. Feathers and shells are a gift to the first medicine people in Manabi, technicians of the sacred. They saw the transgression coming, the soft sand and the pink skies disclose a dry land, a decimated forest, a dead tongue, my heart mourns. The mountain I am, Matilde says, carry me like an earring made of soul and mud. Speak in stories.
I understand the necessity to dream inter-species and co-create with the earth. Clay is a being, is a mother, Queen of the birthing hut. Bones, minerals, plants, breathe looping back into the biome merging slowly for millennia. Nintur created humankind by mixing clay with the blood of a slain god, we need more rites of passages and more ceremonies. In art, I seek the yanantin, the return to essence, a wholeness that imbues the psyche. Sound making, object making, star gazing, the body is a vessel for the most primal creative force, the same force that gave shape to the universe. Taripaypacha, time to meet ourselves again.
In memory of K.M. Continuing the prayer.
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When [in the world] one sees nothing else,
hears nothing else, recognizes nothing else:
that is [participation] in the infinite.
But when one sees, hears and recognizes only otherness:
that is smallness. the infinite is immortal, that which is small is mortal.
But Sir, that infinite, upon what is it established?
Upon its own greatness -- or rather, not upon greatness.
for by greatness people understand cows and horses, elephants, gold, slaves, wives, estates.
that is not what I mean; not that. For in that context everything is established on something else.
This infinite of which I speak is below. It is above. It is to the east, to the west, to the south and to the north.
It is in fact, this whole world.
And accordingly, with respect to the notion of ego:
I also am below, above, to the east, to the west, to the south and to the north. I, also am this whole world.
-Chhandogya Upanishad