My body is here and it disappears like a dance through time

Installation

I dance when I’m at work. I dance with others and sometimes alone. I dance from and through my ancestors, with history and for the future. With all my cells, fluids, bones, skin, and imagination. I love seeing others dance too. And the trees. And the animals.

My body is here and it disappears like a dance through time is an installation conceived as a form of expanded choreography. It holds space to navigate through questions of ephemerality and documentation within performance and artistic practice. It is an ongoing dialogue with space, with others and materials having its attention resting on weight, texture, and volume.  
 
In my artistic practice, I research the notion of plasticity to unfold relations between things and beings inviting movement around and through them. This work draws influences and support from neuroscience, gender and queer studies, and posthumanist theory. Over the past months, I have been working on a publication that simultaneously anchors and destabilizes aspects of my practice. Words that sense their weight, Bodies that write in space have offered space to gather, expand, dissolve, and spread-out thoughts and movements on paper. From a process of resistance and cooperation with qualities of transformation and interruption, the publication will be present and performing a gesture of explosion. In the same space, one will also encounter videos, photographs, textiles, sound, and an ongoing making of the publication in the action of binding its pages together.

Duration: 4h - Come and go
Minimum time recommended 30min.

When / Where

29 April, 17–21
30 April, 15–19
2 May, 17:30–21:30

at SKH Brinellvägen 58 Studio 10

No pre-booking necessary

Credits

Concept, publication, space, video and photographs: Maria Ferreira Silva
Graphic designer: Katrín Helgadóttir
Lighting design: Jonatan Winbo
Technical support: Ronald Salas
Supervisors: Rebecca Hilton and Martin Hargreaves 

I could have not done this without the support and inspiration of all NPP2021-23 fellow artists: Alexis Steeves, Darya Efrat, Eva-Maria Schaller, Felicia Bichard, Irina Anufrieva, Laressa Dickey, Maja Wilhite-Hannisdal, Robert Malmborg, Sarah Bellugi Klima, Sara Kaaman, Tove Skeidsvoll, Valentina Parravicini, Yari Stylo. 

Special thanks to: Chrysa Parkinson, Martin Sonderkamp, Frank Bock, Tove Salmgren, Karin Hauptman, Fredrik Heimdahl, Ingela Stefaniak Öhman, Maria Teresa Santos Ferreira da Silva, Mário Manuel Pereira da Silva, Maria Helena Brazão Santos Ferreira, Stephen Thompson, Camille Durif-Bonis, Susana Travassos, Ana Luísa Ferreira, Eva Lillian Wagner and all the other beings and things with whom I have been in dialogue with in many ways and forms.

Bio

Maria Ferreira Silva, starts her artistic journey at the age of six performing at the local auditorium in the suburbs of Lisbon. She holds a dance degree from the National Conservatory of Lisbon and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Working as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, researcher, mentor, rehearsal director, and at times as a costume designer, she embraces diversity and remains curious for new roles that may seduce her in the artistic field. Besides developing her choreographic work she is dancing in Studio Cité by Benjamin Wandewalle, Twenty-Seven Perspectives by Maud le Pladec, The Köln concert, Monkey off my back or the Cat’s Meow, The House of Bernarda Alba, and The Romeo by Trajal Harrel/Schauspielhaus Zurich for whom she also works as a rehearsal director. Maria defines her artistic practice as a vibrant ecosystem where different practices, roles, and contexts, nurture and feed-forward her engagement with the dance field.