SOMETHING IS COMING. Carolina Mendonça and Lara Ferrari
Carolina Mendonça and Lara Ferrari inquire into the notion of violence through writing and muscular rumination. What type of stories are glued to our muscles but could be freed with a bullet? Can our muscles dream about less violent narratives in a crumbling world?
Carolina Mendonça. She has a master’s in Choreography and Performance from the University of Giessen (Germany) and a bachelor’s in Performing Arts from the ECA-USP in Brazil. She undertakes theoretical-practical inquiry that she shares in workshops examining telepathy, levitation, deep listening and other practices. Carolina always builds her works in conjunction with other artists like Catalina Insignares, Marcelo Evelin, Marcela Santander and Lara Ferrari. Her most recent projects are ‘Zones of Resplendence’ (2023), ‘Sirens’ (2021), ‘Pulp- History as a Warm Wet Place’ (2018) and ‘tierra inútil’ (2018), where she and Catalina Insignares invite the public to sleep as they read at night.
Lara Ferrari. She has a master’s degree in Fine, Visual and Spatial Arts: Urban Space from ISAC, Belgium, and a bachelor’s in Choreographic Composition from the UNA, Argentina. Her practice centres on performance and writing as activities that generate states of empathy, vulnerability and fragility in the body. She works with a commitment to think about affects and sensory practices as political tools that enable dissimilar perceptive modes and build other ways of interacting with one another and the environment. Ferrari believes that the imagination is an approach, a way of understanding reality and imagining other realities.
PHOTO Thany Sanches
Instagram: @carolmendonca; @laratumma
LLENA DE BABA [FULL OF DROOL]. Cacao Díaz
This is a performative piece that draws from biomythography, the experience of writing and radical transvestite imagination to invite us into the universe of a Caribbean Fem Queen, connecting the runway and siren sex (as an artistic and community practice) with ancestrality, intimacy, catatumbo lightning and the untold fragility of migrant trans lives. Llena de baba both refashions and fantasises about another universe as a method of fleeing the hyper-femininity required of trans-female bodies that provide pleasure.
Cacao Díaz. An Afro-descendant artist, performer and singer who works in different live and performing arts disciplines via the body. With all of these resources, they build stories and vibrations based on their lived experience as a migrant and a trans body. A member of the Tinta Negra collective, they are part of the ballroom scene in Spain and the Kiki House of Laveaux. They connect ballroom culture with affective communities of sexual dissidents and migrants within the Don't Hit a la Negrx collective.
PHOTO Fatima Guariota
Instagram: @cacaodiaz
THE COCONUT CAME FROM FAR AWAY—POETIC IMPROV SESSION. Quinny Martínez Hernández (voice), Andy ¡OH! and Diana de La Torre (chorus and percussion)
This specific staging for the CA2M Museum’s Picnic 2024 originated onstage. Carried by drums, it invokes the sacred that engenders a fruit—the symbol of resistance—which attracts the idealisation and assumptions about the Caribbean and other regions just by being named. Its majesty the coconut: it is grated, shredded, chopped, cooked, sweetened, chewed, mashed, aged and spoiled. The coconut lights the flame of the bonfires that cook fears and is drunk to refresh the singing.
Quinny Martínez Hernández. (San Andrés Islas, Colombia, 1979). She lives in Barcelona and is a poet, improviser, creator and coordinator of the publishing project Plataforma Cero, the decolonial writing workshop Hologramas and La FILMIG (Travelling Migrant Book Fair). She is the author of the poetry collections Umami, un corazón erotizado (Diversidad Literaria 2020), Las prostitutas de mi imaginario (El Ojo de Poe 2022) and Salero de Entrepierna (Ultramarina 2024). She is a steadfast believer in the transformative power of art and its different manifestations in order to find a place of expression with a non-negotiable seal of identity.
Andy ¡OH! (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1983). She lives in Barcelona and is a percussionist, singer and composer. Her work is inspired by the traditional music of Colombia’s Caribbean region, while also being influenced by reggae, dancehall and R&B. Between 2014 and 2022, she was the vocalist and composer of Fondo Natural, a music project in which house and cumbia fostered encounters as a political exercise in resistance. She is currently participating in different projects which keep her connected with her roots in her Caribbean birthplace in order to explore the global vision of music and entertainment.
Diana de La Torre (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1984). She lives in Barcelona and is a percussionist, singer and composer. She believes that her best teacher has been the Caribbean through its cultural diversity and musicality. With a 25-year career sharing her voice and percussion, primarily through the power of cumbia, she has had the chance to accompany and learn from important singer-songwriters in the genre like Petrona Martínez and Ceferina Banquez (Qepd) and from artists like Orito Cantora. She is convinced that the music of our ancestors is a spiritual language that connects us with nature and the feelings in our hearts.
PHOTO Carlos Abad
Instagram @erosenguardiapoet