By Biennale of Sydney
22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN
don't blame us for what happened Installation ImageBiennale of Sydney
About the collective
Formed 2009 in Madrid, Spain
Lives and works in Madrid
Alex Aguirre Sánchez born 1973 in Quito, Ecuador
Leticia/Kimy Rojas born 1969 in Guayaquil, Ecuador
Francisco Godoy Vega born 1983 in Santiago, Chile
Lucrecia Masson born 1981 in Ombucta, Argentina
Yos Piña Narváez born 1984 in Caracas, Venezuela
Colectivo Ayllu is a collaborative research and artistic-political action group formed by migrants, people of colour and queer and sexual-gender dissidents from the ex-Spanish colonies. The collective proposes a critique of white supremacy and European colonial heteronormative ideology.
don't blame us for what happened don't blame us for what happened (2019/2020) by Colectivo AylluBiennale of Sydney
"In 2020 we, Black and Indigenous sodomites, are still alive and with wounds we dance the pain away."
- Colectivo Ayllu
don't blame us for what happened Installation ImageBiennale of Sydney
Caution the savage dogs arrived
In 1513, the Spanish conqueror Vasco Nuñez de Balbao sent dogs to kill Indigenous sodomites in the town of Caraquea. From that moment, the Spanish Empire began the heterosexual colonial project.
In 1904, the Mexican police detained sodomites in the centre of Mexico City in the so-called case of the ‘Dance of the Forty-One’.
The same happened in 1956 in Asunción, Paraguay, in the ‘108 y 1 quemado’ case.
don't blame us for what happened Installation ImageBiennale of Sydney
In 1997, a sodomite party in Cuenca, Ecuador, was invaded by police and the participants were detained – a key event in the process of initiating the political activism of sexual dissidents in the country.
don't blame us for what happened Installation ImageBiennale of Sydney
don't blame us for what happened
This installation by Colectivo Ayllu / Migrantes Transgresorxs is ‘a collaborative research and artistic-political action group formed by migrants, people of color, queer and sexual-gender dissidents from the ex-Spanish colonies’.
don't blame us for what happened Installation ImageBiennale of Sydney
Through a labyrinthine tour of four stations (‘eat gold!, insatiable white conquero’; ‘our genders are ancestral drifts’; ‘Pachakuti mood’; and ‘Around the world: my body is a checkpoint / my body is a borderline’) this multimedia installation is proposed as an Andean huaca – fundamental Inca sanctuaries, tombs, mummies, sacred places and animals – which will act as a critique of Western and heteronormative constructions present in the Spanish colony.
don't blame us for what happened Installation ImageBiennale of Sydney
Colectivo Ayllu's brave installation draws upon long memories of colonial pain and inserts contemporary realities of violence from the ‘new dogs’ of racist institutionalised practice that most do not experience.
This oppression from the border to the detention centre to modern technologies of control is for the collective an extremely difficult and stressful way of living in the world.
Tap to explore
Navigate through the gallery at Artspace and explore the work of Colectivo Ayllu.
don’t blame us for what happened, 2019-2020
mixed-media installation with print walls, video projections, audio and altar
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from Australian Print Workshop and Open Society Foundations, and assistance from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and NIRIN 500 patrons
Courtesy the artists
