mariposeo is a trans-species operatic performance, structured as a ceremony in two parts. Instead of forming a complete whole, its fragments come together incompletely. The first segment happens in the theater; the second occurs intimately in a corner studio. Based on literary and ethnographic chronicles, the work engages with themes of transmutation, employing Baroque theatrical conventions, melodrama, mystical masquerade dances, video projections, lighting and special effects.

The term mariposeo references both camouflage and excess. Conceived as a beyond-the-human collaboration, the research explores practices of the closet, mimetic colonial legacies and coded visibility, engaging in a discrete negotiation between concealment and disclosure. Additionally, a sound and light installation extends the work to the privacy of the toilets of DAS Graduate School.

juan felipe amaya gonzalez (jfag) is a body manufactured in the mountains of Colombia that likes to do weird movements and situations for others to experience. He enjoys collaborating and working with others by carefully crafting possibilities for encounters, the unexpected, and enhanced sensuality. His work BRAVURA was shown at the 2024 Tanztage Festival in Sophiensaele Berlin. He initiated the collective project Kimberly Kaviar with Simone Gisela Weber, presenting their work at places like Ringtheater Berlin and Theaterhaus G7 Mannheim. He co-founded Scores for Gardens, a study group that works at the intersection of performance and critical theory, collaborating with institutions like Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, KABK, and the Ostfold International Theater. From 2018 until 2020, he was a member artist of the Creative Europe research project on dance and technology Moving Digits. He co-developed the project “Pattern Parade”, which attempted to summon an AI through occultist and esoteric practices, with the support of the Volkswagen Foundation and Fonds Darstellende Künste, which was presented at the Transmediale Studio in Berlin in 2023. He collaborates with colleagues such as Camilla Strandhagen, Sophie Guisset, Parvin Saljoughi, Maciej Sado, Florine Leoni, Michael Portnoy, Heiner Goebbels, and Nile Koetting. After studying playwriting in Barcelona, he graduated from the BA Dance Context Choreography at HZT Berlin. 

jfag.co

They are three on top of a big rock by a river. Their mouths and ears are close to each other, their voices are soft, as when you want to say something without the words flying off with the wind, as when you want only those precise ears to catch your syllables.

A splash of electric colours enters their view: blue, brown, blue, brown. A Morfo butterfly is fluttering. When she opens her wings, the intense blue catches our breath. When she closes them, she disappears, becomes wood, becomes a tree. The three talking on the rock are familiar with her. They look at her, but the importance of what is being told is too high; the murmurs don’t stop, just as the song of the river can’t take a break. The intensity of the looks is getting higher: something big is to be revealed.

But we don’t get to follow that climax. We get pulled in by something else.

On the top of a hipbone, the Morfo stops. Her wings are folded together; we see her long tongue unrolling to drink water from the bright orange swimsuit, entering the fabric, making holes where others see a flat surface. 

To be able to give herself entirely to the pleasure of penetrating her tongue to quench her thirst, the Morfo butterfly has to pretend to be wood, she has to hide her electric blue wings. For the climatic revelation to happen between the three humans, our eyes and ears must focus on the tongue of the butterfly. We will never know the gossip.

*

Later that day, they are wearing dry clothes and eating donuts at a bus station. The intensity of their eyes is gone, their attention drifts back and forth between their words and the dozens of sounds drifting swiftly around them.

A: “You know what? I don’t think I actually have an ‘artistic practice’.”

B: “What!? if you make a piece of art, you must have had a practice that leads to its making.”

A: “Well, we just sit down and talk. Talk shit about others, talk shit about us. Then the time to have a piece ready comes and we make a piece, kind of in the last minute.”

A drop of peach marmalade falls, leaving a sticky orange drop on the metal table. Their mouths are covered with white sugar powder. 

B: “And who says that gossiping is not an artistic practice?”

C: “I think pieces of art are often an alibi for something else to happen. Something that happens in the before, the after, the margins of what the work is supposed to be.”

B: “Well, I do think you’re a smuggler, as many of us people who migrate to the fucken fortress are. Either you believe the narrative of integration, or you smuggle. You fake to do one thing to get something else you don’t believe in what their rules are defending, so you bend them. You make a festival to gather your friends, you make a piece to redistribute their hoarded resources, you enter a master program to pretend that you became a full human.”

A: “But by smuggling as artists, by making pieces as an excuse to something else, we end up making good copies, maybe even realer than the originals…”

C: “As your dear Taussig wrote: How much of a copy does the copy have to be to have an effect on what it is a copy of?”

They rush to catch their things, they are running late for the bus of course, so they fly off. A tiny brown sparrow comes to the table, jumping up and down to eat the donut crumbs left on the metal surface. Slowly, a thick red tongue comes out of her beak. It is too wide for her throat, too big to be growing out of her. The tongue licks off the whole marmalade puddle with one clean wipe. 

Only you and I know that sparrows don’t have tongues like this. Only you and I know that we just witnessed something impossible before she flutters off through a window by the ceiling.

Catalina Insignares. March 2025