String Figuring - Jugando con Figuras de Cuerdas

“String Figuring” was a space and a practice to move-with others and explore critically and creatively ways to relate and intervene our individual and collective histories, in particular, concerning our social positionality. String figuring used creative prompts called “scores” as methodological, creative and pedagogical resources of our study. The scores of this project invited participants to focus on their embodiment, movement, and creative strategies to examine their relationship with place and space, entanglements and kinships, tension, and practices of refusal.

This project had three iterations: As my doctoral research at the University of Illinois, as a movement-based study focused on speculative mapping of one’s genealogies, and as a practice of memory and kinship with friends in Colombia.

Learn more about this project!

Scores and Materials

Scores, as I understand them, are creative and pedagogical devices that generate an encounter and launch an embodied, collective, artistic exploration with intellectual, and political reverberations.

Here I offer some of the scores that I have been using to inquire multiple dimensions about how we exist in interdependence and in relationship with difference. These, as all processes of inquiry, are a work in progress.

100 Days of Practice

100 days of practice, ” which my friend Sylvia started as an individual practice in “100 días of dibujitos,” is a challenge—or an invitation, to embark on a low-stakes 100-day-long creative practice. The goal is to allow oneself to make one thing a day and be open to what emerges, while trying to sustain rigor in the continuity and to initial parameters one sets for oneself. In my 100 days, I document:

What: “Todas la formas de moverme” (“All the ways/forms in which I move”)

How: Generate a daily record of my movement, understood expansively, in different media

Visit my documentation of 100 days

Inhabiting my borders

What are the borders that contain us?
How do we perceive their existence? Where are they coming from?
How do we inhabit our borders? Can we move them, mold them, transform them?

Researching “Productive Tension” from the body and with others

Research on contact and tension from an embodied approach.

Here I feature movement-based study on learning and tension: Performative Workshop at Body IQ in Berlin (Nov 2019), Study of tension as communication (October 2019), individual study of tension at the University of Illinois (2018) and collaborations 2018 with Lila Ann Dodge (dancer) and Adrian Wong (viola), performed at The Confessional Space by Angela Inez Baldus (2018).

Generative Tension- Body IQ Berlin, 2019

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The Entangler

A device, a concept, a form of encounter

Inspired in conceptual art, experimental pedagogy, feminist theory and pedagogy and performance, I have conceptualized “The Entangler” as a device to use tension as generative material. I have been using this artifact in different scenarios, performative, academic and pedagogic, offering it as a way to activate a an enhanced experience of relationality and its inherent tensions. Also, this artifact intends to embrace these factors as materials for us to explore with, together.

I am grateful with my colleagues and mentors in their support of this exploration.

The Entangler-- 2018 ICQI Congress Performance

Photo by Dr. Sarah Travis

Collaborations in dance and performance

I occasionally collaborate as a dancer with choreographers-friends. Here, “Miraging” by Charli Brissey (2018), “Social Animal Please Tame Me” by Lailye Weidman (2016) —Photos by Natalie Fiol