Artist Statement:
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 work at the intersection of sculpture, performance, and ritual to explore how sound, vibration, and material intelligence function as carriers of knowledge. 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 artifacts, 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 Tropical Coast. Materials such as clay, bone, stone, charcoal, mica and metal are central to my work, not only for their symbolic resonance but for their capacity to mediate between the human and more-than-human world.
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.
We must remember everything, especially those things we never knew.
ABOUT:
Koyoltzintli is an interdisciplinary artist from the Pacific coast of Manabí, Ecuador, territories her ancestors have inhabited for millennia. Working across sound, performance, and sculpture, she creates hand-built clay instruments and ritual-based installations that explore material memory, cosmology, and embodied knowledge. Rooted in research on Indigenous epistemologies of the Americas, her practice approaches clay as both sonic vessel and archival medium.
Her work has been nominated for the Prix Pictet, presented at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the Parrish Art Museum, Queens Museum, the Aldrich, and the International Center of Photography, among other venues. She has held solo exhibitions at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery and Leila Greiche Gallery in New York.
She is the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Latinx Artist Fellowship from the US Latinx Art Forum, NYSCA and NYFA fellowships, We Women, and a residency at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture. She participated in Flow States – La Trienal 2024 at El Museo del Barrio. in 2026, her work is included in Musical Bodies an exhibition and publication from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she will present a solo exhibition at the Al Held Foundation through River Valley Arts Collective and a three-person exhibition at Autograph ABP in London.
Her performances have been staged at the Whitney Museum, Dia Chelsea, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Wave Hill, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Performance Space New York.
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
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