Photo credit: Josie Morrison Young
el mar entre nosotros
Margot Conde Arenas
Wed 15 April | T4
5.45 - 6.30pm
Duration: 45 mins
Access Key: BSL, CC
The first 15 minutes of the performance will be one on one / small group interaction whilst you enter. Please arrive on time.
el mar entre nosotros (the sea between us), is an intimate solo performance merging movement, text, and immersive video projection, exploring water as an archive of diaspora and finding possibilities of belonging in bodies of water. The piece centres around the artist’s autobiographical experiences of movement, memories of ancestors, and of Latin American and European multicultural existence.
Led by a lyrical voice over of the performer's own – she responds in abstract movement, navigating amongst and interacting with the video projections. The voice and mover take the audience through reflections and personal memories: of water, ancestors, and diasporic ventures. The piece is a series of experiments of becoming fluid like water, exploring somatic expressions of internal relationships to diaspora(s), moving to find belonging in her body (of water), and experimenting with the melding of language and music from different cultures.
el mar entre nosotros invites a collaboration between living bodies, waterscapes, and landscapes, merging them with excavations of the artist’s ancestral roots, and experiences of movement throughout Latin America and Europe. Exploring feelings of belonging by seeing ourselves as bodies of water, as part of our natural world, as well as aggressive influencers in human and natural history.
“i find belonging in water… flowing between my homelands, archives of the ancestors I know and those I dream of…
roots buried too deep to feel, but in the sea, my body submerged, they become loose, they grow into currents, and merge together into seas…
constantly moving, flooding, immersed in different streams of possibilities, of movements, of contradictions, and of belongings…”
Credits:
Creator & Performer: Margot Conde Arenas
Video Projection Support/Technician: Kirsty May Hamilton
Sound Design/Technician: Raedie Gaizley-Gardiner
Dance Dramaturgy: Nancy Jacinto
el mar entre nosotros was originally developed and presented as part of Trajectories with Scottish Youth Theatre with mentorship from Cora Bissett, Annie Lowry Thomas and Tim Reid, and further developed with support from Platform.
Content Notes:
Discussion of diaspora & migration, colonialism, displacement, and grief. Audiences may be splashed with water in certain parts of the space.
Photo credit: Josie Morrison Young
Margot Conde Arenas is a Venezuelan/Colombian/Welsh multidisciplinary artist, performer, facilitator, and producer working across live performance, video art and movement, based in Glasgow. Her arts practice focuses on amplifying silenced stories while encountering and transgressing memory in the physical body. Her work explores decoloniality, migration and displacement, homelands, traumatised bodies, womanhood, biophilia, and ancestry. She aims to seek out the unspoken, the unwritten, and the forgotten.
Her work feels inquisitive, colourful, earthy, vigorous, and ethereal. She has a keen interest in movement and narratives within the body, creating movement through somatic abstractions and decolonisation of traditional dance practices. Her work with projection brings video into live spaces, delving into the materiality of film and explorations of shadows. Melding these elements, her work places them in performance spaces to investigate interdisciplinary collaboration and the importance of devising live art to represent diverse life experiences, expressed through multifaceted art forms.
Margot’s work is essentially engaged in questioning neo-colonial structures of knowledge and art production. A dismantling of these systems of violence drives her methodology, and her collaborative working practices with communities as a facilitator; devising performance and embracing imagination as a means of creating radical conversations, collective understanding, and change.