Uncommon Senses V - Lilia Mestre

This multisensory artwork-performance consists of a 30-minute performance in studio followed by a discussion with the performers. The choreographic project “Meeting Through …” uses choreographic research as a way of instigating new passageways of socio-political and environmental awareness. It is a collaboration exploring touch, movement and fabulation as modalities that connect individual bodies and their environment. The project starts from the premise that in our detachment from the chain of production, we have become de-sensitized to the communicative and imaginative dimensions of our embodied tactile and sonic experience of the world. We evade the ecological damage it causes, the histories of the people who make them and the place they come from. In response to this situation, “Meeting Through. . .” attempts to reinvigorate our curiosity with the banal, contingent, materials of our environment. It investigates the relationships between human bodies, everyday life materials, and their political contexts with the hypothesis that, through touch, dance, field recording, and storytelling, we can practice bringing these connections to the fore. In other words, the project cultivates choreography as a research tool that activates our embodied knowledge, cultural backgrounds and situatedness to address our affective relations with the world.

Keywords: touch, embodied practice, deep listening, slowness, speculative futures

This is a 30-minute multisensory artwork-performance. Session 4.3.2.

The artist will be participating in-person (Lília Mestre; Collaborators/performers: Heather Anderson, Esteban Donoso, Diego Gil, Patrick McMaster and Valentina Plata, VK Preston, Aaron Richmond)

Location of artwork: MB-7.265

Artist’s email address: lilia.mestre@concordia.ca

Artist’s institutional affiliation: Concordia University