Born in Tkaronto (Toronto) to Chilean political refugees, Ayelen’s first language was dance which has matured through radical explorations of movement as powerful tools for change and transformation. A multifaceted dancer, filmmaker, activist and community weaver, her work in the world is to lead from the heart and articulate connection.
Ayelen is co-founder of The Wandering Eye, where she co-authors award winning experimental and documentary films and radical media content with Joseph Johnson-Cami that make visible the invisible and harness the power of art as activism. She is also the co-founder and director of Becoming Praxis, an artistic and educational initiative that provokes new ways of telling stories about lands and bodies through the arts and by co-creating Open Source Ritual Architectures: community building land-based experiences.
Staging plant-people conspiracies alongside anthropologist Natasha Myers has been the fountainhead of Becoming Sensor, a research-creation project on High Park’s Oak Savannah that has been presented as keynote presentations, multimedia installations and walkabouts across Canada, the USA and Europe. As a humble accomplice to these lands and their Indigenous caretakers, Ayelen is a co-founding member of the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle who are committed to healing lands and community through Indigenous ways.
In 2018, Ayelen along with 11 other humans co-founded River Rising, a life-long community land project committed to bravely rewilding all our relations and to cultivating spaces of healing and emergence on the Black River fed forest in Ontario. Most recently, the adjacent heritage farm will expand the project with the mission of cultivating artistic creation, food sovereignty, decentralized collaborative governance models, steering a revival of the local hamlet and establishing a hub for cross-pollination towards liveable cooperative futures that center our responsibilities to, rather than our right to land, her resources and to each other.
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