Ofrenda

2021 - Installation (Installation)
5:06 minutes

Ofrenda [Offering] by Elyla includes a single-channel video and the mask used in the performance. The video is a recorded action of the artist, who appears removing a sieve mask that was pinned to the skin of their face, leaving a trail of blood that falls on their naked, mud-covered body. Worn in El Baile de las Negras , a colorful dance performed by men dressed as women, the mask originates from Indigenous celebrations in Monimbó, Nicaragua. In the late 1970s, this mask was adopted by young rebels during the popular insurrection against the dictatorship of Somoza in Nicaragua—they even became iconic in the photographs of Susan Meiselas. More recently, the masks were embraced and resignified by the LGTBQI+ community reclaiming alternative memories of anti-colonial resistance, which included early performances by Elyla, such as Solo Fantasía (2014). After removing the mask, the artist puts it inside her mouth to chew it and then spit it out. The work is a ritual action that addresses the complexities of a gender and sexually diverse body, the violence contained in mestizaje , the ideology of whitening, and the colonial wounds derived from the erasure of ancestral heritage.

Elyla (Fredman Barahona) is a performance artist and queer activist. Their work critically explores the masculine lineage of the Sandinista revolution, the narratives of national identity, and the experience of being a cochon barro-mestiza in a religious, conservative society. Elyla developed a body of work addressing the exclusionary implications of the concept of mestizaje , whose narrative has erased—and converted into commodities—Indigenous and Black identities under the umbrella of inclusive rhetoric. The artist coined the term barro-mestiza to take distance from the traditional understanding of mestizaje and reclaim their Indigenous ancestry, in dialogue with tran-ancestral struggles of precolonial corpodivinities and the memory of the barro (land and soil). In 2013, Elyla co-founded Operación Queer, a collective that blurred the limits between academia, art, and activism, and took a public position against the persecution of sexual dissidence by the repressive government of Daniel Ortega. The artist’s early work consisted of actions in public space that usually defied the authoritarian restrictions and the acceptance of censorship imposed through persecution and terror.

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