A bond of resistance, symbolic and affective, unites the art collective Ayllu. In the original Quechua language, the name means “family”, and while it does not necessarily refer to a kinship by blood, it can also indicate other types of families.
The group consists of five artists and researchers who come from different territories and contexts, or what they call the Abya Yala, the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Alex Aguirre Sánchez and Leticia/Kimy Rojas Miranda from Ecuador; Iki Yos Piña Narváez from Venezuela; Francisco Godoy Vega from Chile and Lucrecia Masson from Córdoba, Argentina, met in 2017 and created this “family by choice” that also represents a safe space for those migrant bodies and sexual dissidents who break with the codes of gender, sex and race.
Their artistic interventions are a call to break the silence and to interrogate history by use of texts, performances and decolonial activism. The group carries out acts of resistance to racism, colonialism and heteronormative sexuality, but also extends an invitation to transform and to collectively heal the wounds left by the conquest and the colonial system upon the bodies and territories throughout Latin America.
C&AL: What is the story behind the creation of the Ayllu Collective and what are its principles?
AC: The Ayllu Collective began as a weaving of subjectivities dissident to the white heterosexual regime and peripheral to the heterocentric racial politics, which is articulated between activism and artistic practices. The collective is a community of dissidences wishing to escape the system of individual creation and to break with the artistic disciplines and Western aesthetics. Our forms and aesthetics do not dialogue with the codes of white supremacist art.
We are a family in the diaspora, a family of choice dissident to the white and heterosexual civilization project. We are a family of indix-descendants and afro descendants embedded in the racist Spanish state.