Operación Queer/Cochona
Managua, Nicaragua · Performing Arts
Photo by Eva Bendaña and Alejandro Belli
The 2025 Art Space Grant was awarded to Operación Queer/Cochona, a Managua-based collective of artists, activists, and scholars creating intersectional, transfeminist projects that use art and critical pedagogy to challenge systems of exclusion across Nicaragua and Central America.
Founded in 2013, Operación Queer/Cochona is an independent, volunteer-led collective based in Managua that blends art, activism, and academia to advance social justice and celebrate diversity. Inspired by queer theory adapted to Central American contexts, the collective explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and ability through creative practices that disrupt conventional narratives. Its members organize performances, exhibitions, publications, and community workshops that confront machismo, racism, and colonial legacies while fostering transnational solidarity. Operación Queer’s methodology, combining artistic experimentation with critical pedagogy, encourages participants to rethink beauty, power, and belonging. Through this approach, the collective nurtures alternative ways of being together, rooted in feminist, anti-racist, and anti-classist ethics that honor human and non-human interdependence. Over a decade, it has become a vital regional reference for queer art and resistance.
Photo by Eva Bendaña and Alejandro Belli
Operación Queer/Cochona was founded in 2013 by Elyla, a nicaraguan performance artist and researcher alongside Alejandro Belli, a photographer and biologist; Ana Victoria Portocarrero, an academic and researcher; Luigi Bridges, a Colombian Nicaraguan based musician and producer and Jilma Estrada, a cultural manager and producer. Together, they created a collective that merges art, activism, and academia to challenge colonial narratives of identity, gender, and belonging.
The Art Space Grant is a collaboration between KADIST and AFIELD.
From left to right: Jilma Estrada, Luigi Bridges, Elyla and Ana Victoria Portocarrero I Photo by Eva Bendaña and Alejandro Belli
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