Elyla: Corporeal Divinities

The first solo museum exhibition of Nicaraguan artist and activist Elyla (Chontales, 1989) brings together over a decade of artistic production, including photography, video, installation, sculpture, and garments used in performances and street interventions. Their practice stems from experiences shaped by the struggles of the cochona community—a Nicaraguan term used pejoratively against homosexual people but reclaimed here as a critical assertion of sexual disobediences and historically abject, despised forms of existence.

In various actions, Elyla disrupts public space to revisit revolutionary masculine traditions and to challenge official history. Their work explores the myth of mestizaje—the ideology of racial and cultural mixing promoted in Latin America—and how it has been used to erase Afro-descendant and Indigenous presence in Nicaragua and Central America. In response, they propose the concept of barro mestiza (“mestiza clay”) as a way to confront and escape its homogenizing logic.

The term “corpodivinidades” [corporeal divinities]—coined by Elyla—envisions an intersection of body, desire, and spirituality, rooted in an ancestral search for travestiand sex-dissident kinships beyond the LGBTIQ+ narratives of the global North. The exhibition is part of a broader program dedicated to contemporary Central American art.