lwrds duniam
b. 1984
Pronouns: they/them
lwrds duniam is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, community educator, independent researcher, and 2019 OCAD University graduate (BFA Integrated Media) living and creating in Tkaronto. Born in Callao, Perú in 1984, they have been calling Turtle Island home since 2002. Their ARTivist practice is informed by frameworks of Decolonial Critical Theory and is anti-racist, anti-oppressive, sex-positive, trauma-informed, and grounded in disability justice. With a focus on Critical Design and decolonial research practices and pedagogies, they have been working as an artist & designer for the past decade.
Their studio practice—which they refer to as brujería praxis—conjures performance, sculptural, illustrative, sonic, poetic, and remediated mixed-media outcomes emerging from a foundation of transgressive witchy knowledge. Traversing the multiple realms of their idiosyncratic spirituality, lwrds’ work responds to their journey of healing sexual trauma at the intersections of gender variance, Blackness and Indigeneity (complicated by an imposed latinidad they reject for its colonial underpinnings), and disability, as a neurodivergent, chronically ill person.
Brujería praxis is an intuitive process of learning with more-than-human beings and valuing energetic exchanges with all that exists. They place sexual liberation and gender plurality at the crux of ongoing healing and rebirth, responding to an ancestral call to reclaim their power, rejecting respectability politics and white supremacist cis-heteronormativity in order to reimagine decolonial futures where we are all safe to blossom into our truest selves.