Shapeshifted (2020)

Shapeshifted was Yoli’s solo show featuring installations, videos, photographs, sculptures and a live performance; curated by Tricia Avant and shown at the Chan Gallery at Pomona College in Claremont, CA.

Yoli brought together the personas of Coachilicue and Shapeshifter, connected via the themes of roots, rooting, rootedness, and the root chakra. The root becomes a metaphor for safety, home, family, sexuality, instinct, one’s relationship to their ancestors, the earth, and blood. In this cosmology, Coachilicue is an intergalactic cactus consciousness who on Earth is honored as a deity. The embodiment of Coachilicue is inspired by Yoli’s origins in the so-called Coachella Valley and the Nahuatl teotl/diosx/god Coatlicue. Coachilicue is the patron of shapeshifters and genderfluid beings.

Yoli also embodies Shapeshifter a persona and “being” inspired by the Nahuatl concept of Nahualism, the ability for a human being to shift into other animal forms, and Huehuecoyotl, the trickster Coyote archetype.  Shapeshifter becomes a humorous representation of our instinct that advocates for non-binary and genderqueer embodiments as natural forms of transformation. Coachilicue serves as the protective force or patron saint of Shapeshifter within this cosmology.

Both of these personas are part of a postcolonial cosmology formation informed by Yoli’s Nahuatl ancestry and commitment to re-indigenizing as a cosmic frijole remembering how to belong.

Coachilicue and Shapeshifter engage in dance, performance, ritual and play inserting themselves back into the Earth where Yoli was born and raised. It is the Coachella Valley, associated with agricultural production, that brought Yoli’s abuelos from so-called Mexico to the so-called US as farm workers. Coachilicue and Shapeshifter literally and ceremonially dig, explore, and excavate Yoli’s personal relationship to home, their roots, and their familial/ancestral relationship to communing with the land. Yoli transforms their family connection to the land from one based on labor-out-of-necessity to that of play-out-of-necessity.

The root chakra (from Westernized Hindu Energetic Systems) originally supported the development of this show. I am grateful to the South Asian & Indian holders of this knowledge way and express grief and remorse for the affects of globalization, capitalism, and new age-ism on how it has been shared. I am grateful for the ways it has brought me closer to my indigenous ancestors and their knowledge ways. I also stand for liberation of all medicine ways from class and caste privilege including Hindutva and Brahmanical supremacist ideologies.