Liliana Conlisk Gallegos: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative

 
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Artist Statement:


    The Coyolxauhqui Imperative is an audiovisual, pre-Hispanic history-based VR piece composed of research, artistic repurposing, and spoken word, to bear witness, honor, and visualize a genealogy of the experiences of Latinx and Indigenous women of the Americas. It is a decolonial retelling of the mythopoetic experience of womanhood within the context of the American continent, in particular Mexico and the United States, concerning European colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism/globalization. The VR project is composed of three major parts, each one representing the main archetype of womanhood embodied by three feminine characters of Mexican and Xicanx mythopoetics: “La Malinche” (The traitor), “La Llorona” (The weeper), and “La Chingada” (The fucked-over one). For this exhibition, I present the part dedicated to “La Malinche” with brief insights into the next two parts.

    I have used TiltBrush in VR and for this piece, and I have designed a virtual world composed of multiple dialogues. Visually there is a trialogue between i) pieces of my analogue paintings and drawings, ii) my digital interventions on excerpts of Mexican murals depicting pre-Hispanic Mexico and the conquest of the Americas (contesting their patriarchal lense), and finally, iii) digitized pictographic excerpts taken from original pre-Hispanic Mexica-Tenochca texts known as codices. Theoretically, there is a dialogue between historical representations of the mythopoetics of womanhood in the Americas, Xicanx queer feminist, and my cosmovision as a Xicanx artist from the Tijuana border, who is also a scholar but who looks to embrace research and the presentation of knowledge production in new and exciting ways. Finally, there are the multiple possible dialogues between the users and the piece itself depending on the audio that will finally accompany the experience. I hope that within any contradictions found in the above experience, this reinforces the importance and value of the Coyolxauhqui imperative and the freedom of diversity and inclusion in terms of identity-based experience and exchange.

Video:

 

Liliana Conlisk Gallegos – The Coyolxauhqui Imperative (360-degree Video) from ACM SIGGRAPH on Vimeo.

Liliana Conlisk Gallegos – The Coyolxauhqui Imperative (2D Version) from ACM SIGGRAPH on Vimeo.


Other Information:


    Chicana Femnism, Indigenous Culture, Mythology, Poetry, and Storytelling