“It is not about art, also not about pure technique. It is about life, and therefore it is about finding a language for life.“

-Pina Bausch

 

 

This hits me hard. It has had this effect because, going further than it was expected from me – a South American child born with enough food on the table but no access to private schools, or even proper medicinal care – I found a way to study and survive – but it isn´t always the case. I was always in search for the knowledge that would „set me free“, that would allow me to comprehend the world better....and it never happened until I started dancing without worrying about what others would think of my crooked body, and which at the time I did not admit: my disabled body. After years of concentrating my professionnal path on performing arts, many injuries and a strong ableist atittude from others and from myself towards my dance practice, I got a diagnosis that set me free. I was no longer able to live in denial.

It allowed me to amplify my world view, specially in arts. It brought me the certainty that there is so much to learn, it also made me start looking for peers and institutions which wouldn´t refuse my work based on the assumption that my body needs to function as any abled bodied dancer.

Being south American, queer, & disabled is part of who I am and it´s part of my art.

 

Nowadays I am interested in places of acceptance and interconnection between different bodies .

As mentioned before, ableism and lack of information has left me years pursuing an impossible artistic path, which did bring me knowledge and resilience, but it also brought a lack of understanding of my own situation and the one from thousands of other disabled artists. How can we work? What accomodations need to be done? How do we deal with our physical disabilities, our chronic illnesses?

We tend to fear the unknown, we create a gap, a tension between us and „the other“, although exclusion based on prejudice and fear has always proven to be a mistake. And this mistake is felt by marginalized groups and the environment, who suffer the consequences of such thinking.

Since three years, not only in concept theory but also in growing practice my work is centered in observing the other & myself through points of view that dare colonialism, heteronormativity and ableism. Pecar, my first funded (funding) autorship work was about 3 different human experiences and personas: the drag queen, the accused prostitute and the peasant artist, initializing an autorship work that questions through art the societal patterns we live in.