Natalia (Nika) Sorzano


Project 2On Desire 2023
Accompanied by performers Fyn [sarafina] Paulina Bonita, Mariana Jurado, Lucija Gregov and Paloma Plantenga.

Borrowing from music concerts, five live performers activate simultaneously with their bodies and voices, in harmony and rhythm, the sculpture-based music band Mud and Sticky Band (see following work), while following a score. The work explores the materiality and agency of the sculptures while interacting with other materials such as trash, lubricant, mud, fire, and organic remains. 

The performance examines the relationship between objects, bodies, and spaces, mediated by desire and intuition. It reflects on the agency of materials and textures observed during site visits across the Netherlands, weaving them into a narrative that connects landscapes, sound, and movement.

Performers harmonize with the sculptures and the accompanying sound piece Mud and Sticky Band: Side A, which draws on embodied research and site-specific reflections. Props and actions echo the textures and shapes of visited landscapes, blending choreography, material interaction, and sound dialogues. 

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Project 3
Mud and Sticky Band2021-2023

Music band made of monster-like characters built from pop-culture waste, recycled materials and natural remains. This object-oriented sculptural band emits sound and voices from its insides, taking the shape of a sound installation. 

The project began with embodied research conducted in natural and urban locations across the Netherlands. Guided by Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, I used this text as a manual to navigate these environments, exploring the interplay between bodies, spaces, non-human entities, and materials. The research involved intuitive object collection and reorganization, soundscape recordings, movement notations, and choreographies inspired by objects and spaces. These were complemented by detailed sound descriptions, conversations with friends, and workshops with students.

This work has been guided by an interest in finding new ways of relating to matter,  ‘nature’ and the environment. By allowing my desire and subjectivity to be shaped and transformed through these interactions, the project creates a dialogue between sound, texture, movement, and form, reflecting an evolving relationship with the material world.

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Project 4Erotic Encounters: Meditative Scores2022
Painting and collage installation part of the embodied research-based project Mud and Sticky Band. The paintings serve as meditative scores for engaging erotically with bodies, spaces, and matter, while the collages explore their texture, agency, and shape. These collages and reflections guided the creation of the band’s members, shaping their performative capacities and personalities.

The project responds to the urgency of rethinking our consumption habits and questions how shifts in our relationship with objects and surroundings will influence musicality, sensuality, and pop culture. It investigates whether new forms of music-making and band-creating can emerge from these transformations and from what’s immediately reachable and at-hand.

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Project 5Contesting Madness2018-2021
Collaborators: RAM Supermarket operator (anonymous), Merel Hooijer, Virgil Zaalman, Floortje Meijer, Esdra Baris, Winti healer (anonymous), Lianne Rueb and Johanna and Vanita Monk. 

Contesting Madness is an installation consisting of four filmic chapters: The Animal, The Water, The Jungle, and The Nightmare. The work features a sculptural structure resembling human body parts, alongside video works, paintings, and objects. Inside the structure, a universe unfolds with video screens, props, mannequins, sleeping bags turned into snakes, fences with dripping liquids, and other transformed everyday objects. Performative responses to texts are staged with various participants, layering sound, symbols, and hybrid characters extracted from conversations around pereived notions of madness and magic. The installation itself blends sculptural and filmic elements, transforming everyday objects to challenge perceptions of identity, sanity, and knowledge.

The work and films examine the impact of coloniality and diasporic movement on perceptions of sanity, challenging modernity’s dichotomies between human and nature, body and mind, and reason and intuition. It critiques the systemic violence of institutional bio-politics inflicted on ethnic minorities, impoverished communities, women, and sexual dissidents. Additionally, it investigates the body’s capacity to communicate beyond language and exist beyond legibility, even as it navigates society’s demand to transparency and graspability.

The project is based on conversations with various guests based in Rotterdam, amongst them: RAM Supermarket operator (anonymous), Merel  Hooijer, Virgil Zaalman, Floortje Meijer, Esdra Baris, Winti healer (anonymous), Lianne Rueb and Vanita and Johanna Monk.

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Project 6Sissy-phus and the Mother Mountain2019
Collaborators: This work was made in conversation with trans activist and lawyer (RIP) Diana Navarro Sanjuan and feminist queer activist and academic Camila Esguerra.

In this video piece I fictionalize and enact the myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor to comment on the LGBTIQ resistance history in Colombia. While LGBTIQ+ activist and organizations reclaim and gain basic human rights thanks to their unconditional struggle, each government that comes in power scratches off their achievements.

In this film, Sissy-phus assumes different roles and encounters a series of characters and natural elements that represent the law, the politicians, the government, the state, and la Madremonte (Mother Mountain) – a female, nonconformist mythological being that opposes exploitation and extractivism. By putting these two myths in dialogue, a western myth with cis men characters and a Colombian farmer myth with a womxn/femalx character, I insert multiple discursive layers that reflect upon feminism, queerness, de-coloniality and disobedience as acts of resistance. 

In this piece, I also insert excerpts from historically relevant events displayed in Colombian news outlets of political statements made against LGBTIQ+ communities by political figures who have frustrated the recognition of full rights and citizenship. 

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Project 7OMNITOXICA     2019
Collaborators: Paula Chaves Bonilla and Thais Di Marco
I contributed to this collaborative work with the scenography. 

Journalistic and forensic performative ritual about the history of Coca and how it passed from being a green, sacred, medicinal plant into a whitewashed, capitalist, toxic product: cocaine. The project borrows strategies from journalism, spiritism, narco-culture, alchemy and activism to construct a dystopian laboratory. Here the politics of death behind what we call the Coca-Cocaine-Cola complex are revealed as the continuation of a neo-colonial order in place. In OMNI TOXICA the coca plant machiavellizes its own court case while shedding light on the incoherent gap between justice and legality, between wellness and toxicity that overshadows this whole multibillion-dollar industry. 

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Project 8Office For Irrelevant Affairs  2019
This performance piece addresses the experience that I underwent over four years as coordinator of LGBTIQ Affairs for the Colombian government. During this period, my team and I received cases of violations against the human rights of Colombian LGBTIQ+ social sectors. Together with activist organizations we created the foundations for a national public LGBTIQ+ policy that would orient how institutions across the state needed to operate in order to safeguard sexual minorities’ rights. However, once a new government took charge, everything we did, including the existence of the LGBTIQ+ office, was dismantled and archived. All the monitored cases and the information gathered through political dialogue across the country became insignificant for an emerging Christian supported right-wing government. 

Through this performance, I de-construct official state documents of violent cases and convert them into a pluri-vocal narrative that moves between poetry, factual information and personal storytelling. Orbiting around a desk and an office cubicle, the main character intends to free neglected files entrapped in political unwillingness, while resisting three shadow-like characters. These embody the indifference of politicians, the weight of impunity, and the corruption that undermines the relevance of sexual minorities' lives.

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