Statement
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.
Current practice:
Grounded in Indigenous ontologies, Latinx anthropology and nepantla; I seek to understand the sonic and oral traditions that have populated the Americas for millennia as a way to repair, reclaim and reimagine temporalities of healing and to tell stories across time and space. I gaze at the night sky the way my ancestors did, to inquire about how to make sense of the world and ultimately connect with them and their stubborn capacity to survive within us.
I re-construct pre-Columbian instruments that have been locked away in museums, reclaiming their sounds and sovereignty. Through this act, my body becomes a vessel for the most primal creative force. I perform so that we may reaffirm our connection to the earth.
To adorn these instruments and to turn them into ceremonial objects, I use achiote, mango leaves, shells, tobacco string, and iridescent pigment that reminds me of the skies in the coast of Ecuador, the ancestral homelands of my ancestors who played these instruments. My work is the past and future conjugated in the present. By reclaiming we remember, by remembering we heal.
I imagine how sounds and rituals can restore a subjective-geographic relation to living systems and 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, healer, and educator living in NY. She grew up on the
pacific coast and the Andean mountains in Ecuador, these are geographies that permeate her work.
She focuses on sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling through collaborative processes
and personal narratives. Intersectional theories and earth-based healing inform her practice.
Nominated for Prix Pictet in 2019, and 2023 her work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in
Washington, DC, the United Nations, Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo, among
others. She has been an artist in residence in the US, France, and Italy and has taught at CalArts,
SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships including the Photographic
Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the NYFA Fellowship, and the IA grant by the
Queens Council of the Arts. Her first monograph Other Stories was published in 2017 by
Autograph ABP, and her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240). In
2021, her work was included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth
Ferrer chief curator at BRIC. In 2022 she is one of the artists in residence at Socrates Sculpture Park
and she has been awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship by US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF).
Send me an email if you want to be on my mailing list and for any other inquiries.
Drop a line, share your thoughts.
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