“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.
String Figuring / Figura de Cuerdas iteration in collaboration with Colombian dancer Ana Melissa Caballero, unfolded as a process of movement-based study of speculative mapping of genealogies and inherited gestures and struggles. From this process, we created R E S O N A N T E, a video dance that functions also as an emergent artifact of our art research. We screened R E S O N A N T E in Bogota-Colombia in 2022, shared it at the event “Making Connection: Mapping Creative Encounters” organized by Linda Knight ( RMIT University, Melbourne Australia) and Alys Longley (Universidad of Auckland, New Zeland). We also wrote about this process and published it in the book co-edited by my and Sarah Travis, Azlan Guttenberg Smith and Jorge Lucero: “Experiments in Art Research How Do We Live Questions Through Art?“, published in 2024.
Learn more about this project!
iLAND Organization - Board Member
I am board member and active participant of the New York-based interdisciplinary arts organization iLAND. With iLAND, we use movement and scores to examine landscapes, practices of place-making, tactics to negotiate spatial politics, craft speculative and emergent places, and practicing landing into new places, among others. I have co-designed and lead workshops and developed creative documentation of these experiences through creative diagramming and digital collage. I have been participant and panelist of the Organization’s anual events, like “Moving with Pause” (2021), iLAND in Dialogue in 2022 (New York), iLAND in Dialogue 2023 (Brooklyn, NYC) and iLAND in Dialogue 2024 (Brooklyn NYC). iLAND also offers workshops in Spanish for newly arrived and established Latinx communities in Brooklyn, using iLAND’s score “Guide for iLANDING” / “Guida de Campo” as a method to use scores and movements to land and make place in new environments.
iLAND in Dialogue 2023, “Entre Muchos Mundos: poetic translation for researching urban environments“, unfolding on June 15-16 in Good Life Garden and public spaces around South Williamsburg/Bushwick, functioned as a gathering of diasporic Latin American artists-scholars and local community leaders to share embodiment-based and grassroot-driven methods for engaging with environmental justice issues.
iLAND in Dialogue 2024, “no title” was a continuation of the study of place and translation, through a sustained movement-study of the environment of “Los Sures” in South Williamsburg as part of the ongoing performance series “move thing” by Jennifer Monson.
As part of iLAND, I develop digital resources for creative documentation, pedagogy and outreach, including the 2025 iLAND zine and the “meditation score” to guide workshop participants in creative reflection and documentation.
Meditation Score and documentation
Meditation score instructions
Here are some of the creative documentation collages and diagrams, and workshop documentation from iLAND in Dialogue 2022 and 2024, and “Moving with Pause”, 2021.
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).
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 and “Skin in the Game: Investigating risk & togetherness (ongoing)“ by Lailye Weidman (2023)
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.
MovEncounters —
Moving in dynamic tension
Long-term collaboration with artist, dancer, mover Natalia Espinel
This page is always evolving… Come back soon! :)