23rd edition Loop Festival_Miratges Mirages

This edition of Loop Festival – Miratges / Mirages brings together works that explore the moving image as a space of memory, resistance and transformation. Within this framework, Torita-encuetada (2023), a single-channel video performance by Nicaraguan artist Elyla, conceived as a radical act of decolonization and ritual re-reading, is presented.

The work is articulated around an anti-colonial ceremony inspired by the tradition of the toro encuetado -a festive framework loaded with fireworks that traverses popular celebrations in a ritual dance- reimagined here from a queer, critical and deeply affective perspective. The title Torita-encuetada combines the feminine and diminutive form of “toro” with the idea of the “encuetado”, charged with light and transformative energy, proposing a conceptual game that subverts symbols of power and reinterprets ancestral practices as gestures of liberation.

Filmed in 5K with cinemascope precision, the piece -produced with filmmaker Milton Guillén and accompanied by the music of Susy Shock and Luigi Bridges- places the viewer in a liminal territory where the ceremonial, the political and the spiritual converge. Its presentation at Loop Festival took place on a curved screen, a fundamental element to intensify the immersion and accentuate the enveloping character of the rite. In this format, the image physically embraces the viewer, activating a perceptive space that evokes the circularity of ritual practices, the movement of fire and the communal power of the gesture.

Its presentation at Loop Festival also proposes a dialogue with the spatial poetics of Enric Miralles, particularly with the ritual and telluric condition present in the Igualada Cemetery. In this articulation, the performance activates the exhibition space as a processional route, where fire, earth, memory and body establish resonances with architecture and its capacity to summon the living, the absent and the transformed.

Conceived to be experienced in total darkness and in large format, Torita-encuetada demands a scale that allows body and image to breathe together. The piece insists on the unrepeatable character of each presentation, underlining the living and ceremonial nature of the audiovisual act.

Within the framework of Loop Festival, Torita-encuetada stands as a space of vision and resistance: a territory where tradition, corporeal memory, anti-colonial critique and queer futures intertwine to imagine new ways of remembering, celebrating and existing.