Colectivo Ayllu

Colectivo Ayllu, whose practice engages in collective modes of creation and criticism, and in the production of alternative epistemes to colonial modes of thought, proposes a collaborative investigation around love. At the 35th Bienal, on panels collectively created and manufactured by artists who are members of the collective – composed of Alex Aguirre Sanchez, Leticia/Kimy Rojas Miranda, Francisco Godoy Vega, Lucrecia Masson Córdoba, and Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes – and collaborators selected by an open call, they write letters to past or future ancestors. To do this, they use various materials and fabrics brought in by the participants, in a form of writing that provides the transmission of a knowledge/feeling that occurs between the physical and the metaphysical. Beyond the political, anthropocentric, and individualizing debates about love, they weave a portal of escape from everyday life, saturated by the capitalistic codification of relationships and the brutality of civilizing choreopolitics. If the colonial wound that permeates and constitutes current geopolitical systems is widened and deepened through interpersonal relationships, turning intimacy into more of an access to violence than a tool for community strengthening, it is collective practice that makes the exercise of a non-conciliatory love possible. Unlike the aesthetic function that generates subjects who appreciate objects, unimplicit in their transparency, in this work it is the doing itself that constitutes the mode of operation of what is presented as a work and the kind of thinking that is made possible through this work. Thus, artists and collaborators evoke modes of existence that precede the subjectified (and racialized, and gendered) body, aiming at the resumption of a sensibility that does not distinguish body and surroundings, a way of being and feeling that is, at the same time, before and after the invention/theft of the body by colonial technologies. 

miro spinelli
translated from Portuguese by philip somervell.

Colectivo Ayllu is a collaborative research and artistic-political action group formed by migrants, racialized individuals, queer and/or sexual-gender dissidents from former Spanish colonies. They  propose a critique of white supremacy and European colonial heteronormative ideology. The collective is composed of Alex Aguirre Sanchez, Leticia/Kimy Rojas Miranda, Francisco Godoy Vega, Lucrecia Masson Córdoba and Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes. 

This participation is supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and Embajada de España en Brasil.