Nuestro Juramento   

Colectivo Ayllu 

Text by Esther Hughes 

Reclaiming the Sacred: Gender, Colonial Memory, and Collective Healing 

Against the urban backdrop of Barcelona, Colectivo Ayllu’s Nuestro Juramento, divided into seven seasons, enacts rituals of memory, resistance, and reclamation of identity. This audiovisual project confronts the enduring legacies of Spanish Colonialism and evangelization imposed on indigenous people of the Americas. As a collective of Latin American and Caribbean gender and sexual dissidents, Colectivo Ayllu reimagines Catholic rituals, infusing them with indigenous cultural references to challenge systems of oppression and reclaim their narratives. This decentring of Christian sacraments constitutes a potent performance of collective healing, bridging themes of colonial memory, urban geographies of power, gender and sexuality, and the transformative potential of pleasure. 

Work shown at the exhibition  Protect Our Secrets  

at  
 

Nuestro juramento, 2022. Video, 26’21’’, 16:9. 
3 + 1 A.P. 

   I.  Colonial Memory 

Si tu mueres primero, yo te prometo escribiré la historia de  

nuestro amor con toda el alma llena de sentimiento, la escribiré con sangre, con tinto sangre del corazón. 

In the first season, a suited man in bejewelled goat horns sings these lyrics from Julio Jaramillo’s song Nuestro Juramento, which gives its name to the project. This coexistence of love and pain within the liminal space of the memory echoes throughout the project, where memory is shown to be heavily subjective, infused with the emotions, experiences, and sentiment of the speaker. The first season closes with the dying words of Hatuey -a Taíno cacique burned for refusing to convert to Catholicism- spoken by a trans woman, with a tear-smeared face. “Y los españoles también van al cielo, yo no, yo voy al infierno, donde me cabes, y por no ve tanta gente cruel.” This act of commemoration is powerfully defiant, reigniting a silenced indigenous voice whilst undermining western binaries of good and evil. For Colectivo Ayllu, memory is an act of resistance that disrupts the hegemonic linear narrative of history. In the fifth Season, named “hemos escrito con sangre la historia de Colon” the ‘anti colonial avengers’ destroy a statue of Cristobal Colon, as written text issues a condemnation to the western world, to suffer the same violence inflicted on the Americas. Here, past, present and future collapse into one another, exposing how the scars of colonisation persist in contemporary systems. By mingling temporalities, Nuestro Juramento reminds us that memory is an actively evolving and vital force that confronts the cycles of violence shaping the present, and gestures towards the possibility of justice and liberation in the future. 

II. Urban Geographies of       Colonialism  

The second season opens with a text recalling the forced baptism in 1493 of six ‘indios’ brought across the sea to Spain. We are then informed that this text is from a plaque in Barcelona Cathedral. This reminds us of the persistence of deeply enshrined imperial values in Spanish institutions, how colonialism continues to make up the fabric of our cities. In the fifth season, 2 afro-descendent women wearing white stand at the base of a large monumental column dedicated to Antonio Lopez y Lopez, a notorious slave trader. One sings Joe Arroyo’s Rebelión, whilst the other recites lines from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, their voices combining, layering, overlapping, cracking in grief, reaching a cacophonous climax. Cries of ‘no se pega la negra’, ‘europa’ and ‘decadente’ echo off the cold, unyielding stone of this monument to slavery. These monumental symbols of colonial wealth and power loom over the city, juxtaposed with scenes of modern poverty: graffitied doorways and piles of rubbish become altars for orations and dedications. Urban poverty nestles in with the grandeur of the colonial past, calling to mind Césaire’s damning condemnation of Europe- a decadent society of contradictions, a society that cannot sustain itself. This urban framing sets individual experiences of displacement and resistance against the architecture of empire, emphasising how the past persists in the present. In Nuestro Juramento, the city itself becomes a site of confrontation - a stage where histories of oppression are acknowledged, challenged, and reimagined. 

Nuestro juramento, 2022. Video, 26’21’’, 16:9. 
3 + 1 A.P. 

III. Gender and Colonialism 

The idea of gender as a western construct imposed on indigenous people is a central thread that runs through the work. A rebaptism takes place in the second season, holy water replaced by huayruros –seeds that act as protective charms to some indigenous communities in the amazon. The rebaptism is accompanied by an evocation to indigenous ancestral deities: “con ellxs renacerán tus nuevxs hijxs anunciadorxs de un nuevo cuerpo mitad y mitad- tanto mujer como hombre, ninguno, un nuevo género.” Performed against the walls of the Cathedral of Barcelona, this reimagining of a Catholic sacrament highlights how the binary concepts of male and female, so deeply ingrained in western belief, were forced onto prehispanic populations as part of the evangelisation of the New World. The reclamation of the catholic rite by gender non-conforming members of the collective connects the memory of pre-colonial gender identities to their present-day lived experience. The mingling of these ancestral identities with hegemonic Christian elements throughout the work underscores the hybrid cultural identities that emerged in response to forced assimilation. Through this, Colectivo Ayllu envisions a collective body liberated from colonial gender structures, gesturing to new possibilities of being that transcend binary frameworks.  

IV. Pleasure as a form of       Resistance 

Throughout the work, Colectivo Ayllu establishes a dialectic between pain and pleasure. From the opening lyrics of Jaramillo’s Nuestro Juramento, blood and love, pain and pleasure, are intertwined concepts. This interplay is a central theme in the oration to “Nuestra señora de los papeles y los placeres” of the third season. This oration subverts the solemnity of Christian prayer by pleading for earthly desire: regularisation papers and the restoration of pleasures stolen through colonisation. On the one hand, the oration is a form of mourning and coming to terms with everything lost to colonialism: “santísima regularización, permítenos recuperar todo el arrancado de nuestras tierras y nuestros cuerpos.” Within the grief and loss, however, there is hope for the return to pleasure; “la idolatria, la sodomia”. The right to inhabit one's body in pleasure is offered as a salve to the deep wound of oppression, violation and displacement. This reclamation culminates in the video’s final moments. A somber scattering of flowers off the back of a boat transitions to footage of the collective dancing, drinking, and partying together, beautiful in their differences, connected in their joy. Succeeding such a powerful meditation on the totalising violence of European imperialism, this celebration of connection, identity, and bodily pleasure becomes its own radical statement. Colectivo Ayllu reminds us that joy is a form of defiance, and inhabiting one’s body in freedom and pleasure is, perhaps, the ultimate act of resistance.