Grants and residencies

Research and art

What is a body when it is lost? Relations between urgency, performance and poetics

Application summary

This project proposes that through the poetics of performance art and my body, it is possible to make visible the forced disappearance of people. Exercised by the neoliberal economies that often take place through an invisible expression of power and terror, which has the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. My proposal is based on a series of questions that are political, phenomenological, aesthetic, and performative: What is a body when it is lost? How to resist and be resilient to the necropolitics? How to hold on to the intangibility of the forced absent bodies? I have the contingent need of addressing these questions in my performance art, with the firm conviction of avoiding the reproduction of violence. Through my body I propose to make a performance art that can be poetic and abstract open to interpretations but that hold together through affects. Deconstructing literal messages and creating a momentary space where absence can be present. I want to understand “disappearance” from the perspective of forensic sciences and meet those who have direct contact to the process of searching, locating, identifying and reuniting bodies. For this project I propose: +Contact and meet the Mexican and Argentine Forensic anthropology teams. +Adopt some of poet Sara Uribe’s Antígona González -questions for devising workshops +Perform my research process in festivals and residencies +Organise an International Performance Festival between Latin America and Finland

The project had to change significantly within its methodologies, strategies and outcomes due to the covid restrictions and due to becoming a mother. Traveling, workshops, collaborations, live performances were cancelled or postponed, affecting the overall development of the project.
My work developed mainly indoors and in Helsinki, making performances for camera, working with ceramics and researching textile iconography and techniques. The experience of motherhood led me to research mesoamerican aesthetics as I remembered breast pottery and their relation. This experience lead me to follow on social media artisans from different nations living within the Mexican territory, whom as a consequence of the quarantine as well, started using the digital media to promote their textiles. As I researched textile techniques, iconography and history, I also read texts written by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, (Mixe linguist, thinker and activist), feminist Maria Galindo, Sara Uribe, Cristina Garcia Garza, among others. I surrounded myself by poetry and epistemology from the global south. Accompanied by these texts I reconsidered my identity regarding the upbringing of my child as a Finnish based des-indigenized woman. This brought me to think in the politics in aesthetics, the visibility or invisibility of non western aesthetics and their presence in Finland as a challenge to the normative dressing codes, experimenting how to dismantle the folklore or ethnic gaze. I researched ancient aesthetics related to femininity in Mesoamerican culture and created ceramic vessels with castings of breasts, as a way of resisting censorship and the objectification of our bodies for the neoliberal profit.

Back to Grants listing