Photographer, Composition, Styling: Yoli

Documentation: Bex Chinisie

Text Support: Tricia Avant

Shapeshifter is a photo project set in a palm tree grove and date field in the Coachella Valley (the unceded territory of the Cahuilla).

Yoli 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. This is 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.

In the photo series, Shapeshifter engages in dance, 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. Shapeshifter explores Yoli’s personal relationship to home, their roots, and their familial/ancestral relationship to communing with the land transforming it from laboring-out-of-necessity to that of playing-out-of-necessity.