DIG 2025: Elyla artists' film programme (Nicaragua)

As part of Tramway's Dance International Glasgow festival, 9 - 24 May,  our gallery programme presents an exhibition of three performance films by multi-disciplinary artist and activist Elyla (b. 1989, Chontales, Nicaragua). 

Informed by Mesoamerican indigenous cultural practices, their work deploys the potency of rituals, folk traditions and ancestral knowledges to mediate urgent social issues and queer politics. 

Torita - encuetada and Rumbling Earth are screened on a loop in our front gallery (T5) at the following times:

Fri 9 May | 12 – 5.30pm, 5.30 - 7pm*
Sat 10 May | 12 – 5pm* 
Sun 11 May | 12 – 5pm   
(CLOSED Mon/Tue)
Wed 14 May | 12 – 5.30pm, 5.30 - 7pm*
Thu 15 May | 12 – 7.30pm
Fri 16 May | 12 - 5pm

*A third film, Prayer for Tending Death, is included in the programme at these times. This film includes scenes of animal cruelty.

ACCESS
All films are captioned, and highly visual.
Relaxed screenings, audiences can come and go as they please.

More about the films 

Torita - encuetada, Elyla in collaboration with Miltón Guillén, (2023), 10min 08 sec

Elyla’s video performance, Torita - encuetada is an anticolonial ceremony, exploring the liberation from the colonial yoke through a fire ritual rooted in a Nicaraguan cultural practice called toro encuetado. Serving as a poignant act of political remembrance, the ritual dance, or mitote, calls for a return to earth-honouring practices and for the decolonisation of the mestizaje of sexual and gender-diverse identities in Mesoamerica. Collaborating with Nicaraguan filmmaker Milton Guillén and with music by Susy Shock and Luigi Bridges, the filmed ritual delves into the encounter of ancestral divinities from Nicaragua’s Pacific region, inviting viewers to witness the intersections of culture, anticolonial artistic praxis, and the sacred. 

Prayer for Tending Death (2024) – 12min 5sec

Prayer for Tending Death depicts a queer performance for transmuting the violence of the cockfighting arena, through healing and peaceful ritual. Elyla, amidst masks and fumes, creates a purifying and festive prayer, a serene ceremony of alternativity for tending death. The artist serves as a conduit between worlds, tapping into ancestral knowledge, bringing forth a feast and creating a ritual of traditional dance and costumes to counter colonial legacies. A peaceful, communal gathering in which the cock, rescued from the pit, becomes an offering, the key element in an act of transmutation. The cock is consumed as part of a celebratory feast, its feathers used as adornments, opening the senses, leaning into dance. The last scene from the film shows Elyla at the centre of a tableau vivant, surrounded by a sisterhood of extravagantly dressed dames, in an evanescent yet powerful celebration of cochona (queer) dissidence.

“started visiting cockfights in Nicaragua after the 2018 uprising that left me with a lot of death taking root in my inner universe. I would take the dying roosters back to my house to honor their death as a way to face the fear for the souls of the people I lost, transitioning to the ancestral realm. So I would give their blood to the earth, plug their feathers, cleanse them with sacred tobacco and share a meal with my queer sisters. This became a way of transmuting the pain of the roosters and our own deaths in the community.” – Elyla

Rumbling Earth (2024) – 13min 40sec

In Rumbling Earth, Elyla draws on the cultural history, poetry and myth surrounding The Masaya Volcano or Popogatepe, a Manque term meaning "mountain that burns," a powerful symbol of the land and spirit from pre-Hispanic and colonial times. Located in the heart of the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is a place where volcanoes ignite their underground incandescence, and the living cultures of the continent connect with that seething, flowing lava. Vertigo and dance, past and present, abyss and flight, all fuse through this corporeality that chooses dissent while also honoring ancestral heritage. Elyla achieves this by addressing the 16th-century folkloric theatrical masterpiece of "El Güegüense,” re-designing “Güegüense” costumes informed by the history of LGBTQ rights in Nicaragua crafted in collaboration with the Navajo artist and biologist Sierra Pete.

About Elyla

Elyla’s activist approach to art aims to pave a way to alternative realities of collective solidarity. In 2013, they co-founded Operación Queer, a collective that brings together artists, activists, and academics to take a public position against the different ways of exclusion and persecution of sexual dissidence in Nicaragua. Recent exhibitions include the 60th Venice Biennale curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the IX/X Biennial of Nicaragua, IX/X Central American Biennials, XII Biennial of Havana, Cuba, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYC, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, and 3rd Toronto Biennial 2024.