Climatic Dances (The lecture)

Endangered Human Movements Vol. 5

Performance

In this lecture the research around the Volume 5 of  Endangered Human Movements*, Climatic Dances is exposed in he form of a intimate lecture performance on arts based research.

Inspired by the work of Mexican anthropologist Alessandro Questa, on two dances from the Northern Highlands of Puebla performed by indigenous Masewal people,  in a context of climate change and mining exploitation. These two dances “Tipekajomeh” and “Wewentiyo” constitute the beginning of a trip towards the depths of the mountain and towards the re enchantment of that which modern science called Geology.

“In this lecture I approach the Mountain as a metaphor for the Earth and work on tracing the transformations on the notions of earth through different historical genealogies and different ontologies. The Earth though of as a deity, as a female being, as a nurturing mother, as a queer being , as a machine, as an Earth being, or Apu and as my own body in movement.  The lecture is a poetic weaving of different ontologies,  written and embodied, rational and magical,  fabulating with new old ways in which art can become a collective form of relating with and caring for the living world. Using indigenous thought as a helpful reference  in the process of re-membering and re-inventing the connections between all living beings, connections which have been erased or dismembered by colonial modernity”.

Amanda Piña

* Endangered Human Movements is the title of a long-term project, started in the year 2014, focusing on human movement practices which have been cultivated for centuries all over the world. Inside this frame a series of performances, workshops, installations, publications and a comprehensive online archive are developed which reconstruct, re-contextualise and re signify human movement practices in danger of disappearing, aiming at unleashing their future potential.