(Elyla) Fredman Barahona

Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland

Artist statement

I’m Elyla, a cochonx chontalli barro-mestiza. I was born in a small village called Villa Sandino in the Chontales department of Nicaragua. I've been working in Nicaragua for the past 14 years independently in grassroots organizations and activism in my community. I'm now participating in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa and the 2024 Toronto Art Biennale curated by Miguel Lopez and Dominique Fontaine. I recently moved to Basel to extend my research at the FHNW in the Master program under the mentoring of Chus Martinez, Filipa Ramos and Phoenix Atala. My name "El-y-la" means "him-and-she" in Spanish. I’m interested in recognizing gender as an apparatus of modernity that permeates life beyond the politics of the self or the colonial gender binary. In Nicaragua, "cochón" is a term used to refer to dissident sexualities, and I speak from that space to foster epistemic knowledge production rooted in Mesoamerican localities. "Chontalli" is derived from the name of my birthplace, Chontales, the land of the indigenous Chontal people. It is a word of Nahuatl origin that can be translated as "queer, foreigner, outsider." "Barro" means mud and speaks to our relationship with land and nature, calling for a return to earth-honoring practices. "Mestizaje/mestizo" is a political identity that represents an ethno-cultural syncretism resulting from colonization imposition. These aspects are woven into my being and shape the lenses...

Artwork