Natalia (Nika) Sorzano


Q-LoXXXPerformance-to-video2025
Performed by: Pau(la) Chaves Bonilla, Flor Chavela, Paholy Lenar Alvarado, Francia Misha Bustamante Blanco, Sasha Aguilera, Yoacin “El Lobo” Villalobos, María Maiz Bermúdez, Alexandra Arévalo, La Aluxe Solis y Patri Roa Johansen.

This work is a performance-to-video piece enacting in eight scenes the collaboratively written creation myth of Q-LoXXX. It depicts a volcanic island where all earthly species—extinct, endangered, and present—exist in a state of continuous mutation and becoming. This transformative place is threatened by static and contaminated external forces, prompting its inhabitants to enact a cannibal sacrifice to restore the land’s cyclical and ever-changing nature.

The project connects Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses with queer resistance experiences and theory, breaking through static subjectivities and fixed identities. We channel the lives, efforts, and achievements of those before us, carrying our queer ghosts with us into a utopia of our own collective imagination and creation: Q-LoXXX. Through this process of speculation and fictionalization, we reclaim figures, spaces, memories and beings, to highlight them as ideals and values of our shared experience.

This project was developed through a collaborative process with queer Latinx asylum seekers and migrants from the extended community of Papaya Kuir. I co-facilitated a series of writing and performance workshops that employed character building, role play, fabulation, and collage to collectively create the myth. I then synthesized this work, transforming the raw material into a structured script of eight scenes. To materialize the universe of Q-LoXXX, I crafted props from papier-mâché and found objects and painted the scenography, giving form to our transformative space for the community, of which I am part of, to experientially live its utopia and document its own methods of world-making.


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Cannibal Becomings  Workshops2025
This work is a co-creation and participative project done in collaborations with Papaya Kuir, -an activist organization working with immigrant Latinx queer communities in the Netherlands-, and its extended community.

This work consists of a series of workshops that re-signify the figure of the cannibal, reclaiming it as a transformative concept symbolizing mutual contamination, interconnectedness and radical solidarity.

The project engages with Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses, which challenge notions of purity and propose multiplicity and mutation. By inquiring into the politics of nomadic queer and trans experiences within the Latin American diaspora in Europe, we aim to reclaim cannibalism from its colonial associations with savagery. Instead, we reinterpret it as a metaphor for absorbing otherness to stimulate new creation and foster community.

Together with Papaya Kuir, we formed a group of 12 queer Latinx migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees through an open call. The co-creation workshops were structured around three methodological axes: 1) theoretical-corporeal reflection (discussions on anthropophagy and Amazonian epistemologies, multi-species meditations, collective writing of manifestos); 2) cartography and material creation (body counter-maps, painting of mutant portraits, utopian collages, prop fabrication); and 3) performative embodiment and story-telling (cannibal role-playing games, creation of stories and myths, dance and performance to video).

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Contesting MadnessVideo Installation2018-2021
Based on conversations with: RAM Supermarket operator (anonymous), Merel Hooijer, Virgil Zaalman, Floortje Meijer, Esdra Baris, Winti healer (anonymous), Lianne Rueb and Johanna and Vanita

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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Triple Pocket Napkin Fold - GHOSTSound Publication
2020 - 2022

GHOST is a nomadic DIY platform based between Rotterdam and Marseille, co-founded by Mads Bycroft (AUS), Kari Robertson (UK) and Natalia (Nika) Sorzano (COL). Under this cipher, they are interested in experimental forms of assistance, collaboration, authorship and exhibition making. They have initiated screenings, performance events, and exhibitions across alternative locations—a boat, a botanical garden, a community centre—as well as in galleries and cinemas in Rotterdam, New York, Bogotá and Marseille.

Triple Pocket Napkin Fold is a glimpse into diverse sound-making practices, featuring new compositions by twelve contemporary artists, poets, musicians and theatre makers.

For this project GHOST commissioned artists whose practices engage with concepts or methodologies of opacity and improvisation, key themes in the work of Edouard Glissant, who wrote of these as forms of resistance to dominant culture(s).

A pocket hides what is inside until it can be performatively revealed. From the opacities of poetry and withheld language emerges this collection of folded, layered, improvised, imperfect and unexpected forms of address: mud dancing, whispers, shouts, laughter, screams and vocal sound making that resist the order of speech.

With contributions from Ogutu Muraya, The Postpeople, Cannach MacBride, Angela Schilling, Dean Bowen, Karin Iturralde Nurnberg, Isabel Marcos, Milena Bonilla, La Leche Travesti, Aloardi, Megan Cope and Isha Ram Das and Dani Reynolds.

The project emerged from a study group on Glissant’s The Poetics of Relation (1990), facilitated in 2019 by GHOST and Tender Center, a queer community space in Rotterdam.

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