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 actions and sound dialogues of the sculptures and live performers reflect the agency of the sculptures’ materiality while interacting with other matter, such as trash, lubricant, mud, fire, sand, and organic remains. They also follow the narrative of the sound piece Mud and Sticky Band: Side A, which incorporates reflections from my embodied research during site visits around the Netherlands.
This work inquires and experiments with the relation between objects, bodies and spaces mediated by desire and intuition.
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The process consisted of an embodied research in natural and urban locations around the Netherlands in order to explore desire with sound, texture, movement and shape. I took Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology as a instruction manual to navigate these locations while analyzing the relationship between bodies, space, other non-human bodies and matter. I have included methods such as intuitive collection of objects and their re-organization; recordings of soundscapes; notations of movements and choreographs instigated by objects, bodies and space; thorough sound descriptions of the environment; conversations with friends; workshops with students, amongst others.
This project has been guided by an interest in finding new ways of relating to matter, ‘nature’ and the environment, while allowing my own desire and subjectivity to be moved and transfomed by this relation.
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This painting and collage installation is part of the research-based project Mud and Sticky band, consisting of a music band made of monster-like characters built from organic remains and recycled materials.
The paintings are an on-going series of meditative scores for becoming and engaging erotically with other bodies and matter, such as swallowing fire or a score on how to have a sexual encounter with a cactus. The paper collages serve as study documents on texture and shape. These have become guiding tools for the making of the band members, their sounds and voices, their shapes, textures, personalities and attitudes.
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Contesting Madness is composed and built around four filmic chapters: The Animal, The Water, The Jungle, and The Nightmare. The installation comprises a sculptural structure that resembles human body parts, video works, paintings and objects. Inside the bodily structure, a universe unfolds with video screens, props from the filmic material and intervened everyday life objects such as wigs, mannequins (limbs), sleeping bags turned into snakes, fences with viscous liquids dripping, spider webs and clothing. In the films I stage performative responses to texts and enunciations with the participation of guests and myself. I layer sound, symbols and hybrid imagined characters that I extracted from conversations I staged around perceptions of madness and magic with different people in Rotterdam.
These conversations in combination with theory, led me to address the impact of coloniality and diasporic movement over perceptions of sanity; a return to nature and animality that contest modernity’s dichotomies between human and nature, body and mind; the systemic violence of institutional bio-politics inflicted on ethnic minorities, impoverished communities, women and sexual dissidents; and the capacity of the body to speak beyond language and exist beyond legibility, while finding itself limited and/or invited to access secret knowledge.
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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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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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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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