As part of my thesis research project Here, Not., performer Daniela Pascual Esparza and I are presenting the paper Here Not: Dialogic research on dance, curating and the making of place beyond the art gallery, at the AHRA2023 Conference in Portsmouth University on October 26th.
The presentation is part of the session Patience in Placemaking organised by Belinda Mitchell, University of Portsmouth; Victoria Hunter, University of Chichester; Virginia Farman, University of Chichester.
ABSTRACT
“Here Not” is a dialogue between the research of curator Micol Curatolo and the dance practice of Impropias Collective presented by performer Daniela Pascual Esparza. The paper accounts for placemaking as a collaborative practice that inhabits public and semi-public spaces through art. We argue that curating and contemporary art offer a processual vocabulary for transforming urban sites into care-ful places, and we take the artist-curator relationship as a starting point to reflect on architectures of care.
Curatolo’s curatorial research unpacks the politics of participation in the context of the art exhibition. She uses border thinking to address the relation between borderization (Achille Mbembe), access, and the belonging of bodies and cultural objects in the urban environment. In dialogue with this framework, Pascual Esparza introduces Impropias’ dance practice as a case study of artistic placemaking beyond the gallery space.
cuerpalatina is a participatory performance by Impropias Collective that reinterprets popular dances from Latin America and researches dance as a social phenomena. How does dancing transform public spaces and the ways we relate with one another? A nomadic piece with several iterations in Helsinki, cuerpalatina sheds light on how site-responsive and embodied practices reappropriate public spaces tangibly and affectively.
cuerpalatina is a participatory performance by Impropias Collective that reinterprets popular dances from Latin America and researches dance as a social phenomena. How does dancing transform public spaces and the ways we relate with one another? A nomadic piece with several iterations in Helsinki, cuerpalatina sheds light on how site-responsive and embodied practices reappropriate public spaces tangibly and affectively.
The paper argues that artistic and embodied practices offer an ecological approach to placemaking: they shift the focus from building to inhabiting, from the permanent to the ephemeral. However, the intangible gestures of a performance perdure in the bodies of the participants and in the cultural associations assigned to the site that hosts the encounter. By examining cuerpalatina’s dramaturgical components – distance, repetition, and the disruption of spatial rhythms and conventions – we demonstrate how dancing, in its immediate and experiential approach to the built environment, is an instrument for creating spaces of encounter, conviviality, and alterity. Placemaking becomes worldmaking.
