Dorsky Museum introduces Koyoltzintli as artist-in-residence
Koyoltzintli, "Wawkikay"—We Belong to One Another (sample whistle)
The Dorsky is proud to introduce this year’s artist-in-residence! Koyoltzintli is an interdisciplinary artist, a healer, and educator who grew up on the Pacific coast and the Andean mountains in Ecuador, geographies that permeate in her work.
She focuses on geopoetics, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling through collaborative processes and personal narratives, and intersectional theories and earth-based healing informs her practice. She explains the plan for her project: “Departing from my research on ethnomusicology, Native American sonorism, and ecology, I am proposing 'Wawkikay'—We Belong to One Another. For this sonic sculpture I am inviting people from campus to construct pre-Columbian whistles with me. While we make these whistles, we will meditate on what it means to ‘belong to one another.’ What is home in unceded territories? What is home for folks that come from war-torn countries? And what is home and how do we share space with our more-than-human kin?
"I intend to create a series of questions that will point at ways in which we can question structures of power and also, how we can dismantle ideas of separation through the act of making something together and the practice of active listening.
“The final installation will be 432 whistles hung from the ceiling, and together they will create the shape of a bell. For the culminating piece of the project, I will teach each participant how to play their whistle until they find the tune. I am interested in the potential of sound as a repository for memory and resistance.”
Nominated for Prix Pictet in 2019, Koyoltzintli’s work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in DC, the United Nations, Aperture Foundation, and Paris Photo, among others. She has been an artist-in-residence in the U.S., France, and Italy, and has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships including the Photographic Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, NYFA Fellowship, and the IA grant by the Queens Council of the Arts. Her first monograph “Other Stories” was published in 2017, and her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture (no. 240). in 2021. She was included in the 2021 book “Latinx Photography in the United States” by Elizabeth Ferrer chief curator at BRIC.
