about
Marcela Torres was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and currently resides between Brooklyn, NY and Chicago, IL. Their nomadic energy keeps them traveling between homes and families, visiting lands they have ritual responsibilities with. Torres is a 3rd generation Mexican-American, from a lineage of Braceros, railroad workers and Mormon Mexican pioneers. Separating themselves from their families Latter Day Saint faith became the first experience of emancipation from generational colonial assimilation. From that point onward Torres has searched into their Mexican indigeneity, Aztec and Toltec culture, spiritualism and current activations. Torres is locating a indigenous intuition through individual and collective practices of rematriation.
Torres holds a BFA & BA from the University of Utah, a MFA in Performance from School of the Arts Institute and is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Visual Art at SUNY Old Westbury in Long Island, New York.
In my life and within my practice I wander as a nomadic searcher, from place, cosmic planes and medium. I am driven by the question:
“Do I deserve to have my indigenous culture and if so how do I access it once it was lost by my ancestors?"
This guides my internal map to learn practices, develop land kinship and community that completes a series of unlocking rituals, bodily transformations and sacral objects. Generated through communal ceremonies, I build objects that hold these indigenous spiritual systems and create moments where they are activated.
For the past 5 years I have studied formally and informally Mitotilliztli, Danza Azteca. This movement is a ceremonial dance form and cannot be learned in a school, each part must be earned through responsibility to the community. Each dance and its corresponding ceremonies and activities are meant to honor a different entity that gives us life. Largely these movements are for community ceremony and for individual revelation. As an artist, I can see the deep impact these experiences can give a larger public. They provide alternatives to consumerism, nihilism, isolation and colonial self hate and control, they remind us we are interconnected vibrant kin. Our sweat from ceremony is the offering back to the universe. The objects become totems and are brought into the ceremonial portal. The performances I create honors traditional modes, while movement prompts are questions to situate these ceremonial powers into the direction of contemporary need.
My questions are about building tangible methodologies to place native ideologies back as the priority in one's life, to listen to each other; to nonhuman animals, plants and the cosmos. For folx who have experienced forms of diaspora or assimilation there is a confusion, a literal distance between our culture and ourselves.
Yes, we deserve the grasses’ smell, the love of our non-human kin, but we have to ask for it, earn trust, and keep it consensually reciprocal. Through natural clay forging, adobe brick building, fire rituals, collective performance, instrument making, I find more answers to who I am outside of a colonizer lens, and I continue to want to share that with others, not as a show-and-tell but as a methodology others can find for themselves.