Amanda Piña

Endangered Human Movements is a long-term interdisciplinary project which has been striving to decolonize arts and culture since 2014 by exploring human movement. Frontera / Procesión – Un Ritual de Água is the fourth instalment of this research project. Amanda Piña’s latest creation is rooted in the history of the conquest and colonization of America: it explores contemporary forms of violence and domination, such as the ones ongoing in the north Mexican city of Matamoros and at the border with the USA, where factories looking for cheap labor have settled and where drug trafficking runs rampant. With an approach combining anthropology, history, philosophy, visual arts and dance, the choreographer investigates how to choreograph borders, blending together colonial narratives, indigenous practices and hip-hop culture. By involving people identified as ‘outcasts’, women in difficult situations, vulnerable people and non-professionals, Piña invents a contemporary “water ritual”, imagines new forms of solidarity, as well as movements seeking to decolonize arts and bodies.

Amanda Piña, is a Chilean choreographer and dancer living and working between Vienna and Mexico-City, who is passionate about making art political. She works a lot on issues like the various forms of exclusion, the nature of exclusion and the identity of marginalized groups.  Her project “Endangered human movements” tackles the issue of the destructive matrix of the colonial and capitalistic discourse, and she promotes the freedom to create in dance formations rather than the normative mimesis of classical technical training. To fight against the uniformization of actions and thoughts, she proposes to go back to “other” ancestral gestures and practices from invisibilized spaces. Her creations and the collective research spaces she opens are rituals to subvert dangerous ideological oppositions between modernity and tradition, human, animal and vegetal, nature and culture… Amanda Piña is interested in art beyond the idea of producing a piece: she wants to develop new platforms for the creation of new sensory experiments.

Her works have been shown in many renowned artistic institutions such as the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, the MUMOK Museum of Modern Art, the Royal Festival Hall in Londres, the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City etc… She studied painting and theatre in Santiago de Chile, in the Theatre Anthropology department in Barcelona, and contemporary dance in Mexico, Barcelona, Salzburg (SEAD) and Montpellier (Ex.e.r.ce Choreographic Centre Montpellier) with teachers like Mathilde Monnier, Joao Fiaideiro, Xavier Le Roy, Olga Mesa and Julyen Hamilton. She received her instructor certification in Feldenkrais in 2013, and she’s been using this technique in her research on movement and in her performances, installations and video projects. She has been the director of the choreography and performance collection in the nadaLokal Gallery, which she created in Vienna with Swiss visual artist Daniel Zimmermann.