Somatic Laboratory - Trans*latinx Memories | Pedagogies of Reexistance and Repossession

Rooted in intersectional, anti-discriminatory and decolonial practices, and with an interest in creating conditions for re-existence, re-organization and collective transformation, Somatic Laboratory - Trans*latinx memories, is a political-pedagogical project that aims to develop critical approaches to somatics, supporting individual and collective wellbeing in the Trans*Latinx community, with special focus on asylum seekers living in NL.

Our aim to research how an embodied anti-racist and trans*feminist practice supports the development of more liberatory teaching-learning environments, and contributes to collectively build a memory of self-preservation, resurgence and affective resistance.

Organized together with Papaya Kuir, a lesbotransfeminist grassroot collective of migrants from Latin America and the spanish-speaking Caribbean based in The Netherlands, the project emerged as a need to affirm the ethics/politics of care at the center of social justice. Addressing socio-political reproduction of embodied colonial violence and consequential trauma in people of color and those with trans and kuir identities, we propose practical workshops, based on touch, image-making, listening, voicing and dancing, in which the participants can explore the relation of identity, play and transformation and different feeling-thinking experiences of transitioning, migratory and self-perception processes. Activating practices and encounters for exchange and political listening as modes of exchange and mutual acknowledgement, we explore activate encounters, talks and mixed laboratories, with the wider ATD community of practitioners and students, focusing in how the knowledge of resistance and resilience, of agitation and grounding, of indignation and regeneration, form a corporal and socio-political infrastructure, serving as a network of resistance that respects multiplicity.

BIOS

Paula Montecinos Oliva is Chilean choreographer, sound artist and somatic practitioner , grounding her research in the affordances of live-sound performance, with an embodied, decolonial and technofeminist approach. Her artistic practice embraces the physical and spatial dynamics of sonic experience, unfolding the performativity of sounds along the crafting of analog electronics, somatics, experimental vocals and written matter. Her pedagogical work is committed to a transdisciplinary approach that incorporates practices of liberation, improvisation, touch and collective listening with the interest in creating forms of relationality and difference, beyond the individual.

Flavia Pinheiro is a choreographer and performer from Brazil currently based in Amsterdam. Her research foregrounds networks of resilience and resistance to systems of knowledge by fabulative speculations around Science and Technologies. Her artistic practice in an ongoing attempt to create breathing and vital conditions; in an unstoppable dance she creates improbable exchanges with the nonhumans such as bacterias, plants, birds, antelopes and ghosts. She focuses on states of survival and refusal of captivity by proposing a radical ontological turn. She navigates in different media (photography, video, performance, urban interventions, installation, sound, writing) to underline how diversity and transversality can contribute to (un)learning colonial pedagogies.

Paula Chaves Bonilla is a Colombian choreographer, performer and queer activist based in Amsterdam. Born and raised within the boom of narco-paramilitarism and the expansion of globalized politics, she conceives art as a survival strategy and device able to hack the hegemonic power structures at play. She studied dance and circus in Bogotá, New York and Berlin and later obtained a degree in Choreography at the University of the Arts in Amsterdam (AHK). Marked by her migratory paths, Chaves Bonilla's artistic research is located at the intersection of non-western feminist practices, journalism, dance and fiction as sites where to imagine transnational, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial modes of existence.

Somatic Labs schedule

28 April and 5 May with Paula Chaves
20 June and 4 July with Flavia Pinheiro
7 and 14 July with Paula Montecinos

Somatic Laboratory - Trans*latinx Memories coordinators are Paula Montecinos and Flavia Pinheiro fellows at DAS THIRD. This project was made possible with the support of Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation CoECI, Papaya Kuir, Platform 2025, ATD Lectoraat and Quality funding one-off grant

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