GHL Facilitators Anna Donnell And Denise Yvette Serna have been in Oaxaca, Mexico this month, exploring and devising at Pocoapoco.
They are joined by talented, creative artists from different parts of the world, whose creative practices are innovative and inspiring. See these artist’s bios below, and follow our Instagram for daily updates from Pocoapoco.
Argelia Matus (b.1978, San Francisco Ixhuatán, Oaxaca) is a visual artist working across various disciplines, techniques and materials. After many years working in art restoration she now has dedicated herself solely to her personal creative work including painting, drawing and textile experimentation with human hair. She began to use the “jícara” (crescentia cujete) 11 years ago, as an object of aesthetic exploration in utilitarian design and artistic material. Her work is characterized by the use of organic and natural elements, configured from rigorous manual exercises to better understand her own self-knowledge and the world around her. These two axes, the material and the execution, allow her to create a narrative that resembles the traditions present in artisanal processes, a principle that characterizes her work. Matus studied Visual Arts at the School of Fine Arts in Oaxaca and Pedagogy at the NationalAutonomous University of Mexico, UNAM and has exhibited collectively across Mexico and Latin America. Individual exhibitions include “Oficio de tinieblas” (2015) at the Oaxaca Textile Museum, “Xhigaguenda | The souls of the jícaras ”(2018) in Espacio Artístico Xicoténcatl, Oaxaca and “Bacaanda. Halves of Dreams ”(2019), at the Olga Costa-José Chávez Morado Art Museum”, Guanajuato, Gto. She lives and works in the city of Oaxaca.
Diana Lizbeth Gómez Córdova (b.1991, Oaxaca )is a Oaxacan artist, born by cesarean section in 1991. She likes kites, hates coffee with milk and does not know how to play video games. She is currently an interdisciplinary cultural worker and stage creator with a special emphasis on comedy. Her work consists of theater, dance, circus, and writing. She has collaborated as an interpreter in different various theater companies such as “Carapacho Teatro” ,“Teatro colaborativo”, “Tierra independiente”, “Colectivo Guajolote” and “Teatros de participación”. However, her primary practice is the creation of her own pieces which she writes, directs and interprets. In them she seeks to express her being and therefore she refers to her story, to the place where she lives, to her most frequent dreams and nightmares. She was the beneficiary of the FONCA 2017 and ENARTES 2020 grants, which meant she had -- for a short time -- a little more money to produce her work, and the opportunity to perform in different towns and cities of the Mexican republic. She is still waiting to go abroad. She is co-creator of the project “Chante Itinerante”, aplatform for professional and emerging performing art.
Luvia Lazo is a native and resident of Teotitlán delValle, a Zapotec community in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. She is an actress, photographer, cultural entrepreneur and promoter of the Zapotec language. Photography is her way of portraying the worlds towhich she belongs, and capturing them to share them with others. She seeks to portray reality from the gaze of contemporary Zapotec women, creating a constellation of images through time and spaces inOaxaca, documenting the generational gaps and the transformation of identity through the ages. Throughthis photographic and career path she finds herself, by the chances of life, coexisting among creators ofhandmade, unique and exquisite pieces that she has decided to share. Luvia graduated from CNCI University in graphic design and holds a bachelor's degree in teaching and foreign languages, specifically English, from the Benito Juárez University of Oaxaca. She was partof the acting workshop given by Héctor Flores Komatsu at the Community Cultural Center of Teotitlán del Valle in 2016 and has participated in many photographic workshops. She was selected for the group exhibition at the Manuel Álvarez Bravo Photographic Center, curated by Joan Liftin, as well as exhibitions at the Casa de la Cultura de Juchitán, CORDOBA LAB in Oaxaca Centro, was selected for the 2019 Documentary
Photography Diploma workshop at the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, Oaxaca and was beneficiary of the Young Creators program of FONCA 2020-2021 in VisualArts, specializing in Photography. Yohana Desta is an Eritrean and Ethiopian-American writer and filmmaker based in New York City. For the last five years, she has been a staff writer at VanityFair, where she has written cover stories on Chadwick Boseman, Regina King, and Janelle Monáe. She is also an MFA candidate in film/television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, honing her craft as a writer-director.
Krystel Cárdenas (b.Guayaquil-Ecuador, 1985) is Visual artist whose work moves between painting in diverse media out of the canvas (wood, textile) andinstallation. She seeks and explores the transformation from image to object with the intention of preserving in it a memory, question or emotion and communicating it with the surroundings. She is curious about human emotion and her work aims to bring up conversations around women and cultural identity, building a visual registry of a dialogue between various feminine forms, herself and the voices that surroundher.
Marly Gallardo: Centering on portrayals of ephemeralsites of belonging, Marly Gallardo’s work is a meditation on impermanence and renewal. Through her work, Gallardo explores themes such as migration, nostalgia, and yearning. Her pieces reflect the nature of being uprooted from one’s homeland and yearning for a return, whether that return is to a geographical location or an emotive plane. Gallardo’s art is informed by indigenous craftsmanship, featuring elements of ancestral folklore, spiritual botany, and historical connections to land. She has won numerous awards for her work. Most recently, Gallardo was named a recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Award. She currently teaches illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Nana Yaa Poku Asare-Boadu is a performance artist who weaves a movement vocabulary of dance, speech, and video that complements and challenges histories of improvisation. Deviating just so from dance-contact, Asare-Boadu considers how improvisational forces explore the self and relational entities both animate and inanimate. This repertoire of movement tests the possibilitiesof sensuality, with Asare-Boadu meandering between stoic and seductive postures that navigate how affect, audience, and architecture inform the physics of the black female body. She has presented work atThe Dreamhouse and BRIC, both New York, Dallas Museum of Art and Soho House in Los Angeles. Asare-Boadulives and works in New York.
