photograph by Nina Wurtzel
Design for Performing Arts
As a Visual artist in performing arts, I explore visual narratives by proposing and composing stage pictures, whether inside the theater, the gallery or in a site-specific environment. A stage picture, which can be created by large-scale tridimensional structures, objects, digital images or scenic paintings, is always designed in conjunction with the performer’s body to allow for the composition to transform in time and to be ‘completed’ by the performer’s body. In each aspect of my design work, I seek to stimulate the actor’s and spectator’s imagination, and foster multilayered connections between the members of these two groups. I position myself as a visual artist who investigates potential uses for new technological resources and aesthetic possibilities in parallel to intellectual inquiries about our perceptions and experiences of site, space and stage. In my artistic practice and scholarly research, I am also aware of the social responsibility that I, as a designer, have in the creation of visual narrative.
photograph by Jack Carr
Scenographic Research
The contemporary understanding of expanded scenography makes the underlying structures of representation visible, presenting the spectator with multiple understandings that expand a literal text (Aronson, 2017). Meaning is, therefore, replaced by relationship, and scenographic elements become epistemic objects that are always unfolding in a permanent state of definition.
The relationship between objects, texts, performers and space, together with the audience, co-construct the meaning of a theatrical event. In my research on street theater, I have developed the notion of space-characters, such as cathedrals, cemeteries and town squares, that are conceived as having a direct relation to the performance texts, at once symbolic and pragmatic, of everyday life and the performance in which they are inserted (Oteiza Silva, 2017). This relational understanding of scenography is at the center of my scenographic inquiry and it presents itself as a recurrent theme in my designs, videos and scholarly work.
photograph by Javiera Gutierrez