Catalina Insignares

Catalina Insignares (COL) works as a choreographer and is based in Paris. As a choreographer, she’s looking for that moment when dance, touch and movement escape their disciplinary regimes and generate unintelligible, unapologetic, what-ever-like subjectivities and collectivities.
Her work is mainly built through collaborations for staging, dramaturgy and performing. Since 2015 she develops a one-to-one dance piece and long-term practice titled us as a useless duet.
In 2018, together with Carolina Mendonça she creates a work involving a night reading directed to sleeping bodies and titled useless land, created in the frame of the exhibition the dead are living- how to ruin an exhibition in Berlin and reactivated Elsewhere&Otheriwse (PaF), Precarious Pavillions (Brussels), MärzMusik (Berlin) and La ferme du buisson (Paris).
Since 2017 she works with choreographer Myriam Lefkowitz as a performer in her immersive works, but also in a collaboration (La Facultad) that finds ways to infiltrate sensorial practices derived from their works in diverse social contexts. 

Since 2018, she has started a research on how to use the sensorial and fictional means of dance to communicate with the invisible (Bouillon), particularly with the dead (ese muerto se lo cargo yo).

Research:

Over the last year, together with my collaborator Myriam Lefkowitz, we have started a series of interventions in which our previously developed one-to-one works are challenged, transformed and put to service to other social contexts far from the ones of art. Making alliances with different actors in social work, we let our interventions start from the invisible bottom, working the relational there where our allies find that there is a particular need. 

Parallel to that, I have started a work on ese muerto se lo cargo yo (“the dead I carry”)It builds a frame for one-to-one meetings in which we can listen together to other forms of existence, particularly those of people who are dead but that still “speak” or are made sensible to us.

Through these practices, I tackle very concrete social and therapeutic problems. How to give support to someone who is lacking any sort of basic recognition of his/her humanity? How are the means of sensorial work and poetic digressions important for someone who has zero stability in a day to day basis? What is to heal? What is to help someone feel better? What constitutes the roles of the care-giver and the care-taker? How to address a body that is mainly overwhelmed by fatigue and a constant need for erasure? Is it of importance that what I do in the realm of social work and therapy is still claimed to be an artistic pursuit? How exactly can our practice challenge the notion and embodiment of the subject as individual and “free-willed”? What is it to place ourselves in the position of learning about resilience and capacities for care from the most vulnerable?

 

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