Marielys Burgos Meléndez

Visual Description: Marielys Burgos Meléndez’s installation, Invocations Oshún (Puerto Rico, 2021 & 2023), consists of photo and video documentation from a ritual performance created by the artist in Puerto Rico and California. A series of four photographs hangs on the wall in a salon style. The largest photo depicts a woman (the artist) lying on a large rock in the middle of a rushing river from a birds-eye view perspective. The woman is wearing a cream-colored dress and rests a large green leaf across her stomach. She holds a piece of fruit in one hand and rests the other across her chest. The rock is shiny and wet from the water. Yellow flower petals are strewn across her body and the rock. Her head turns away from the camera and her feet dangle delicately above the water. The smaller three photographs show details of the woman submerged in the water below. One shows her lower body partially submerged in the water while she presses her hands to her chest. Another shows the artist unclothed dipping her hair in the water. The last detail shows just her extended feet as she drags the discarded dress along the water gracefully. The accompanying video gives detailed audio-descriptions of both the photos and the video.

Curatorial Description: Marielys Burgos Meléndez is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across dance, poetry, and performance art. Invocations Oshún (Puerto Rico, 2021 & 2023) is an audio-visual installation that explores the ways in which movement has the capacity to choreograph memory. For this work, the artist travels to her homeland of Puerto Rico to create the ritual performance of Invocations Oshún. Oshún is one of the orishas (deities) originating from the Yoruba religion and is considered to be the Goddess of water, fertility, creation, and sensuality. Having survived the transatlantic slave trade, the Yoruba religion was then incorporated into other Afro-Caribbean religious practices, resulting in alternate depictions of the Goddess. Meléndez’s invocation of the deity here traces this history of cultural, spiritual, physical movement, and memory through the practice and transposition of ritual.

About

​​Marielys Burgos Meléndez is an AfroBorikua artistic researcher, advocate, moverthinker, and process-based interdisciplinary artist. Her movingsentient CUERPA is the primary source of creative investigation which expresses through ritual performance, movement improvisation, performance photography, choreographic scores, creative writing, and video. Her work/ life is framed through Anti-Colonial and Decolonial practices/ epistemologies, Social Justice, Intersectional Feminism, and Antiracism. Hence, she is interested in the knowledge and relational dynamics that emerge from creative practices and processes. 

Since 2014, she has investigated experiences, poetics, and narratives of mobility/ migration/ dislocation which catapulted her into an artistic excavation of my histories, stories, and genealogies of colonial embodiment and education. In 2017, she got stranded in Lenapehoking due to Hurricane María and found a home in NYC. While in Lenapehoking, she worked/ performed with artists such as Pramila Vasudevan, Antonio Ramos, iele paloumpis, Jill Sigman/ThinkDance, zavé martohardjono, Christopher Unpezverde Núñez, and Yanira Castro/ a canary torsi, and worked as dance administrator and communicator for several arts organizations like Performance Space New York and Movement Research. 

As a doctoral student in Critical Dance Studies, her current academic research focuses on the intersections of embodied spirituality, African and Indigenous ancestral practices, anticolonialism, liberation, experimental dancemaking, and the migration/ dislocation experiences of Indigenous, Black, and African descent artists. 

As an independent and self-funded artist, she has taught and shared work in academic and non-academic institutions in México, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Scotland, Dominican Republic, Canada, my native Boriké, Lenapehoking (NYC), and other places in Turtle Island. From 2021-2023 she was an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research and in 2023, she was nominated for a Bessie´s Award for Outstanding Performance (Ensemble) alongside Rafael Cañals and Christopher Unpezverde Núñez for their work in The Circle. She is the author of Errática, her first self-published artist book (2019) in collaboration with Taller Asiray.