FRONT ROW with Amanda Piña

To Bloom () Florecimiento

In her recent work, Amanda Piña addresses the pressing socio-environmental crisis by engaging with First Nation educators to explore other forms of relationships with mountains, glaciers, rivers, and the ocean. Through this collaborative work she compiles non-western ontologies of water and earth that emphasize bodily experience. These series of works and practices serve as a means to shift pre existent understandings of the body towards future ancestral, relational, and collective perspectives. In her talk, she will share insights from her artistic practice through oral storytelling and visual works, culminating in a shared collective experience.

As we seek to adapt to a burning planet, we must rethink how we live, perceive, and experience the world. What role do our collective bodies play in this social, political, and spiritual transformation?

To Bloom () Florecimiento is an ongoing research that investigates the power of embodied practices to foster societal transformation and contribute to the decolonization of the senses. It also serves as the title for various artistic works across different media that are part of this initiative. The term blooming refers to ancestral Mesoamerican ritual practices that aim at achieving a fullness of the experience of a relational body.  To bloom together, to strengthen ourselves together.

BIO: Amanda Piña (1978) is a Chilean-Mexican Austrian based artist living between Vienna and Mexico City. Her artistic work is concerned with movement and choreography. She works in different media including performance, music, video, song and sculpture that exist in the context of the theater, the museum and beyond. As a multifaceted artist, Piña engages in choreographic, performance, and dance research, creating and curating within educational and artistic frameworks while also writing and editing publications on what she calls “endangered human movement practices.” With a rich heritage that includes Spanish, Mapuche, and Lebanese (Syrian-Palestinian) roots. Her work embodies the political and social power of movement, grounded in indigenous forms of knowledge and world making/maintaining practices. Her work has been presented, in theatres, galleries, museums and cultural centers around the world, such as Kunsthalle Wien, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain Paris, MUMOK Museum of Modern Art Vienna, deSingel Arts Campus Antwerp, Museo Universitario del Chopo, México and GAM, Santiago de Chile among others.