Somatic Choreographies: Spaces of encounter between art, community, and the land (an ongoing project)
Saturday May 30th, 11am - 1:30pm
An experiential participatory workshop by Óscar Moreno Escárraga and Cielo Esperanza Neme Neiva. We will bring experiences and contributions from our Somatic Choreographies experiments in Bogotá to the Hudson Valley community. Honoring ancestral communities in Colombia, we will engage sensory, poetic, and imaginative ways of understanding the connection between art, culture, and life in transformation.
Sharing: WATER LINES
A presentation by Aurora De Armendi Sobrino and Andrea Frank of their current collaborative project that was developed in dialogue with local rivers and streams. It involves drawing with string in different bodies of water and translating those drawings into watermark pieces through papermaking processes.
This project is made possible with funds from the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
Background:
The context for the co-creative process of Somatic Choreographies is a shared desire to create bridges across divides--between South and North, Indigenous and Western, young and old--, and to engage in deeper listening to and connecting with each other and the land. We engage relational objects, photography, video, and poetry in our creative processes in collaboration with communities in New Paltz and Bogotá, and our students.
This emergent experiment takes shape through workshops, exhibitions, performances, talking circles, and other engagements.
Óscar Moreno Escárraga is a Colombian artist and a professor at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota, Colombia. He is interested in the sensory body, ancestral and ancient knowledge, and social poetics. Through micropolitical and ecological experiences, he proposes actions such as walking, conversation, and collective action.
Cielo Esperanza Neme Neiva is an industrial designer, ceramicist, and a professor at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Colombia. She is interested in design and the art creation process with a focus on the connection between haptic, emotional, and conceptual dimensions.
Aurora De Armendi Sobrino is a Cuban-born artist and currently Assistant Professor in Printmaking at SUNY New Paltz. Through a balance of scholarly and material research, her work has taken the form of prints, drawings, artist books, hand-made papermaking pieces, and ceramics; exploring the poetics of place and the singular and collective histories and memories therein.
Andrea Frank is a German-born artist and a Professor in Art at SUNY New Paltz. In her studio practice, she explores ecological complexity and collective responsibility through photography and related media. She has developed the collaborative System Drawing format to explore emergent pathways toward a regenerative culture across disciplines.