Documentation: Bex Chinisie

Video Editing: Yoli

Text Support: Tricia Avant

Shapeshifter is a ritual, embodiment, and video project by Yoli (who formerly went by Estela Sanchez). Yoli embodies Shapeshifter, a persona and “being” inspired by the Nahuatl concept of Nahualism, the ability for a human being to shift into other animal forms, and Huehuecoyotl, the trickster Coyote archetype.  Shapeshifter becomes a humorous representation of our instinct that advocates for non-binary and genderqueer embodiments as natural forms of transformation. This is part of a postcolonial cosmology formation informed by Yoli’s Nahuatl ancestry and commitment to re-indigenizing.

Shapeshifter engages in dance, performance, ritual and play inserting themselves back into the Earth where Yoli was born and raised. It is the Coachella Valley, associated with agricultural production, that brought Yoli’s abuelos from so-called Mexico to the so-called US as farm workers. Shapeshifter literally and ceremonially digs, explores, and excavates Yoli’s personal relationship to home, their roots, and their familial/ancestral relationship to communing with the land. Yoli transforms their family connection to the land from one based on labor-out-of-necessity to that of play-out-of-necessity.