Artist Talk Amanda Piña: 'To Bloom () Florecimiento'

Foto: Bea Borgers

Ontwerp: Mary Ponomareva

Location: Quartair  
Address: Toussaintkade 55, 2513 CL Den Haag 
Date: 16 November 2024 
Time: 13.00 – 16.00 hrs  
Entrance: free incl. drinks and snacks
Register: via Eventbrite (max. 30 participants)

On the 16th of November Stroom Den Haag in collaboration with Quartair proudly presents:  To Bloom () Florecimiento with Amanda Piña. Together with participants, we want to explore how our sense of time, shaped by local histories, environmental concerns, and current challenges, affects how we imagine our collective past and future. By bringing together ecology, ancestry, and alternative knowledge systems, we aim to move away from individualistic and exploitative thinking, to instead think through interconnected approaches that focus on responsibility, healing, and envisioning new possibilities for the future. 

As we seek to adapt to a burning planet, we must rethink how we live, perceive, and experience the world. What role do our collective bodies play in this social, political, and spiritual transformation? 

During To Bloom () Florecimiento, Piña will share more about her recent experiences with the Apu Wamani mountain and its extraction by mining companies. From here, she will take us along her exploration of other ontologies of water and earth that are at the core of her practice. We will discuss her learnings from the School of Mountains and Water and the School of the Jaguar as forms of artistic research centering decolonial praxis. The second part of the program includes film screenings of Apu Wamani and Divina Presencia and a guided experience in which we encounter our bodies as ancestral. 

Amanda Piña’s versatile artistic practice reaches from performance, music, and video to textile works and is to be found in the context of the theater, the museum, and beyond. In her most recent work, Amanda Piña addresses the pressing socio-environmental crises by engaging with First Nation educators to explore other forms of relationships with mountains, glaciers, rivers, and the ocean. Through these collaborations Piña is able to compile non-western ontologies of water and earth that emphasize the body. 

As a multidisciplinary artist, Piña works through choreographic and dance research, creating, curating and working within art institutions, university and artistic educational frameworks. Her practice also involves writing and editing publications around what she refers to as ‘endangered human movement practices.’ To Bloom () Florecimiento is an ongoing research project investigating the power of embodied practices to foster societal transformation and contribute to the decolonization of the senses. It also serves as the title for various artistic works across different media that are part of this initiative. The term blooming refers to ancestral Mesoamerican ritual practices that aim at achieving a fullness of the experience of a relational body. To bloom together, to strengthen ourselves together.