To Bloom ( ) Florecimiento

New Creation 2024

Performance

 

 

To Bloom ( ) Florecimiento

Amanda Piña / estudio fortuna 2024

INSTALLATIVE IMMERSIVE PERFORMANCE

#performative Sculptures

In her current artistic research, Amanda Piña explores water as a fluid entity and the ocean as a realm of ancestral knowledge

Her work illuminates two key facets: She examines mestizo, first nations and Afro-diasporic understandings of water, encoded in dance  and sound, which have persisted and flourished  in Abya Yala, ( the Americas) within and beyond violent contexts such as colonisation,  slave trade and capitalist extraction.

Secondly, her research explores oceanic movements on a broader scale, encompassing the motions of ancient animal species—such as sponges, cnidarians, mollusks, and echinoderms—as well as the historical and contemporary movements of ocean currents, diasporas, and migrations.

Imagining an ancestral future in which water is not any more understood as stuff, h2o or a natural resource, the installation performance  embodies the ocean as a nexus of origins, transit, and demise, transformation and  extinction,  yet also as a vibrant realm crucial for the sustenance of life on Earth.

 

 

 

 

 

CURATORIAL TEXT BY Nicole Haitzinger

 

“Water reflects what people living nearby believe water is.”  (Emerson Munduruku)

 

Choreographer Amanda Piña in collaboration with Nyandra Fernandes and an ensemble of artists from the Americas, Europe, and Africa create a fascinating installative performance as an oceanic celebration. Based on the movements and supra-temporal memory of ancient underwater species such as sponges, cnidarians (jellyfish and coral), mollusks and echinoderms, the choreography reconnects historical and contemporary events related to the so-called AMOC oceanic current phenomenon (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). From the 16th to the end of the 19th century, more than 35,000 trade voyages with more than 10 million enslaved people subjected to forced migration followed closely the existing currents. These currents facilitated the movement of ships carrying people, goods, and extracted resources through the “Black Atlantic” triangle between Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

The immersive installative performance to Bloom () Florecimiento is created by a diverse ensemble from three different continental contexts and the Caribbean. From a global perspective, the history and cultural memory of the transatlantic trade of enslaved people has been shaped by profit and global power, forced immigration and creolization, racism, exploitation and extreme violence.

In addition, petro-masculinity, neo-colonialism and capitalism have literally fueled the constant exploitation of resources in Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, the pollution of oceans and rivers, and the deforestation of mangroves and rainforest and still persists today. At present, scientists fear that the overheating of the world’s oceans will cause a major change in the currents and winds of the AMOC. The climatic consequences of these changes are not yet clear.

Intertwining historical, ancestral, and contemporary micro- and macro-movements, the cosmic and the political, the ocean and its entities appear as a confluence of flow, death, and decay, but also as a vibrant, vital realm that sustains our lives. In To Bloom () Florecimiento, the word “blooming” is used as a metaphor for the continued resistance of indigenous, afro-diasporic, and local communities who continue to practice forms of honoring water as the source and fountain of all life: Water as a fluid entity and not as material stuff. Our collective hosting of the re-appearance of three Orishas as “high art” (Nyandra Fernandes) as well as ancestral memory is a ceremonial act of resistance against petro-masculinity and a worship of the beauty of threatened aquatic ecologies.

Nicole Haitzinger