The Open Seam: Torbellino 1 — The Dance of the Hummingbird (Ndukun)

2025–ongoing

Performance + textile structures

 

This performance begins with a story I was told by a Kogi man in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. He spoke of a fifth race—the hummingbird. Not defined by color, territory, or nation, but by movement. A being that carries messages across borders without belonging to any fixed place.

I work from that idea—not to illustrate it, but to stay with its implications.

Here, race, nationality, and gender don’t hold as stable categories. They shift. They overlap. They come undone in the body.

The work draws on torbellino, a dance shaped by Indigenous and Spanish lineages. Its rhythm is a form of movement through territory, but also through history. A way of holding contradiction without resolving it.

The textile structures I use are not costumes. They come from garments like the rebozo, the pollera, the mantón de Manila, the huipil—but I don’t reproduce them. I displace them. I bring them into tension. They carry histories that don’t fully align, and that friction is where the work happens.

Credits / Presentations

WhiteBox, New York, 2025

Lessons to Understand Art History

Art Week Mexico City, 2026

Galería Ana Tejeda

Curated by Karen Cordero

New York University (NYU), 2026

Conversation with Amalia Uribe Guardiola