ABOUT Yoli

Yoli is an indigiqueer 2-legged nagual (aka shapeshifter), and re-indigenzing cornstalk with roots along the border and so-called central mexico. 

As a performance and interdisciplinary artist; they explore the intersections between queer intimacy, playful choreographies,  land-based sentience, curanderx medicine ways, and indigenous cosmologies. They are the “creative visionary” of Teatro De La Vida, a fluid “performance-based healing ensemble” where the roads of ancestral arts and healing practices meet performance art and experimental theatre.

As an Eco-somatics/ embodiment practitioner and herbalist-in-training; they are passionate about liberating from colonial disembodiment and rooting in belonging as a "hije perdido" (lost child) finding their way home to the Land and queer'ed ancestral ways of "being". Yoli is currently working on their DIY PhD, an embodied research project centered on “El Cuerpo Presente”; sparked by School For the Ecocene. “El Cuerpo Presente” (meaning the Present Body) refers to the connection between our body, our presence, and the Teachers of La Tierra rooted in “Mexican Curanderismo” traditions. Through El Cuerpo Presente, Yoli shares offerings and services to create space to connect to Land, Body, and Being and to explore play as embodied Land-based medicine. 

Yoli and their work/workshops has been hosted at diy and community spaces, dance parties, retreat spaces, The Herbal Ginger Center, Frieze LA, The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Chan Gallery, and Pomona College’s Art Department as a guest lecturer. They have also been awarded residencies and grants through The Ghostlight Residency, The Golden Dome School, and BAAIT’s Two-Spirit Artist Mini Grant. They have a BA in Studio Art from Pomona College and a permaculture certificate through Soulflower Farm, and they are invested in their on-going community-led education through their Diy PhD “El Cuerpo Presente”. 

Along with their aforementioned practices, they share what they learn through video/photography, movement, sculpture, installation, writing, friendship, medicine making, "being", and other emergent forms.

poema

i am alive and breathing, sensing and feeling, escuchando al abueles de la tierra with the ears that live in my hands and feet and heart. Remembering mis raices, my roots- milpa constellations - mountain ombligos, umbilicals - hummingbird songs - human beings that care for the Earth and each other with firey tenderness. Embracing who i came to be- transforming - wilded - totality and absence - rainbowed - tortillerx - queer. Expressing thru the body and the emergent expressions that flower paradigms of care and connection to each other and the Madre Padres de la Tierra