Fernanda Libman

Originally from Rio de Janeiro, I moved to Amsterdam in 2016 to study choreography at SNDO. During the BA I discovered a great interest in the intersectional field between movement and sound which led me to also study electronic music production at Sae Institute.

My work wishes to touch liminal spaces of perception as a way to expand on questions of selfhood. My approach to the performative space is from a synesthetic perspective: To see sound, to be touched by time, to experience image, to become language.Rather than an affirmation of what things are, I am interested in the incomprehensible, to approximate myself of aspects of what we don’t know, to what we cannot know or to what we still need to create tools to know about the way we relate to each other. This choice has to do with a desire of transgression of the form and norm, an impulse that translates in my compositions with elements of distortion and  dissociation. Embodied researches on the territory of dreams, subjectivity, death, the invisible, the unknown are recurring sources of my projects.

My work was shown in several venues in Amsterdam such as DooR Foundation, Dansmakers, Theatre De Vlugt, Bostheater, Ot301as well as in Sāo Paulo at Greta Galpāo and Madrid at Centrocentro.

Next to my own creations I engaged in collaborations with several artists as a Choreographer, Sound Composer and Performer. Since 2022 I am part of the group Cara de Cavalo directed by Carolina Bianchi, where we work on the topics of sexual violence, art history, gender in crisis and the confrontation with the ephemerality of the theatre. Currently we are working on the trilogy ‘Cadela Força’.

My research in DAS revolves around the phenomena of Hypnagogia, a term that refers to the transitional state of consciousness that happens between being awake and asleep. While the thoughts are traversing from the objective to the subjective rhythm of the mind, our sensorial body can at times translate this shift in neurological activity into hallucinatory images, sounds or bodily sensations.

Differently from the Dream State, where the subject feels fully immersed and actively takes part on the situation, in the Hypnagogic state the apparitions tend to be experienced as if we are passive observers of that event and the hallucinatory experiences are often related to short time memories, presenting a possible unfolding of a situation or thought that happened while being awake.