Flavia Pinheiro
Flavia Pinheiro, is a choreographer and researcher from Recife (Northeast Brazil) who works in multiple forms depending on the contexts (publications, conferences, performances, urban intervention, installation, manifestos) and involve herself in different types of collaboration and exchanges in the Netherlands and in Brazil. Through this, she foregrounds networks of resilience and resistance to systems of knowledge in various cross-border nuances in artistic radical practices that underline diversity and can contribute to (un)learning and exchange across environments.

In her research she describe herself as a bacteria - because she comes from a highly contagious environment, far from the aseptic conditions that is expected of a solo artist bound to a studio. As a bacteria, she finds it very easy to mutate and coexist: She adapts to the new environment in an ongoing attempt to create breathing and vital conditions. All throughout her body of work, she highlights the productive difference between the in vivo and the in vitro condition used in scientific discourse. In vitro is latin for “within the glass”. Experiments that are done in vitro are conducted in test-tubes and petri dishes, outside of a living organism. By consistently balancing the artificial ("in vitro") environment of a studio with ("in vivo") engagements in public spaces she is attempting to create a diverse set of artistic works that is meant for a broader public.How sovereignty within hegemonic neoliberalism could be fractured by speculative fabulation and the embodiment of non-human spectrality in such realms is the core of her researhc.Empirical sciences often pride themselves of being devoid of a subject - while they are in fact highly fictional, narrative-based research fields. From the vantage point of an artist, she consider the evolutionary story a fable, and the whole field of empirical science a violent fabulation in which (as history shows), some lives are inherently devaluated over others. In her current research ;a particular fable about the unborn, the in vitro condition reverberates across all domains of scientific discourse and practices: characters such as petri dishes, microscopes, magnifying glasses, compasses, green houses and zoos fills the stage – in an ongoing attempt to capture and catalogue nonhuman subjects.