Performance

sinfinamente (2020)

Short film

sinfinamente is an exploration of individuality during the 2020 pandemic. The title is a play on words in Spanish, combining “without-a-refined-mind” and a distortion of the word “confinement.” This short film satirizes behavioral trends during the lockdown, where modern survival instincts justified self-centered actions such as stockpiling, overconsumption of media, and a community-harming focus on the individual's mental health.

Beyond the COVID-19 context, sinfinamente criticizes Western culture's individualistic tendencies when addressing global issues. The visual narrative is accompanied by an audio component broadcasting news in French, highlighting alarming global conditions. This starkly contrasts with the depicted individual's passive behavior, shown as simultaneously eating cereal, watching his phone, and taking a shower. This juxtaposition underscores the disconnect between the severity of global community conditions and the individual's indifference to them.

Transform (2023)

Animation and virtual performance

In Transform, the animation examines the interplay between gender identity and body image. Rooted in my exploration of corporeal knowledge, I employ a sketchy style influenced by glitch and generative art to portray the complex sensations of identity dysphoria that arise when challenging conventional gender expectations. Characters such as witches, demons, and monsters emerge, symbolizing identities that resonate with marginalized narratives in contemporary culture. These figures embody the resilience of often overlooked communities, celebrating the inherent power and fortitude of each individual.

The live virtual performance, utilizing motion capture technology, features an avatar that interprets themes of gender fluidity inspired by the animation. This ritualistic performance draws from pagan traditions like “La cura de huevo” (egg cleansing) to symbolically cleanse the avatar of societal stigma and bias associated with non-conforming gender experiences.

Más sabe el diablero por viejo (2024)

Poster for "Más sabe el diablero por viejo"

Más sabe el diablero por viejo (“The porter knows more because he's been around longer”) is part of a series of performances within the installation Valemadrismo s m (popular) which aims to interpret the working class as a culture. This performance involves my embodiment of a porter's labor, depicting tasks such as stacking boxes onto a hand truck and navigating long distances while encountering obstacles. Purposeful moments of disruption, like dialogues with the cameraman, are included to highlight the distinction between embodying labor and performing labor. I adhere to my practical approach of "depicting labor through labor."

MoCap animations for "Valemadrismo s m (popular)" (2024)

Animation and virtual performance

The MoCap animations were produced to document, through different tasks, how the body understands the labor of a public market vendor as a means of creating a non-script-based archive of knowledge. This process draws inspiration from contemporary archival practices of knowledge rooted in the body, such as LaJuné McMillian’s Black Movement Library.

By translating labor into data, this project aims to make evident that new media provides space to analyze corporeality in its own language, since action verbs like “to clean, to carry, to pull,” etc., do not fully translate the physical effort and muscle memory involved in performing labor.