Interview with Amparo González Sola [AR]
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As part of our «RESIDENCY FOCUS», We invited Argentinian choreographer Amparo González Sola to answer a few questions for us about her residency at Rote Fabrik [CH] at the end of 2020, the impact of this format on the career of young artists, and reciprocity midst times of distancing.
Could you tell us about your trajectory, and how do you see the role of residencies in an artist’s career?
I am a choreographer, dancer, researcher, teacher, and activist from Argentina. I currently live between Buenos Aires, Paris, Amsterdam… Much of my practice is affected by my condition of migrant, by that state of constant displacement, by being situated and alien at the same time. To be an artist in residency has a lot to do with that: it allows me to confront and let my research be affected by other ways of doing/thinking/feeling, makes it possible not to take things for granted, to questionhegemonic practices and discourses.
The residency I did in Zurich was for me the possibility of letting my research be affected by other questions, the possibility of listening to the resonances of my questions in other bodies, in other materials and sensibilities, the possibility to having unexpected and beautiful encounters and creating bonds that will continue to grow up through time, for sure.
«I wonder if we will manage to invent ways of encountering and sharing outside the “online” formats of control and surveillance.»
– Amparo González Sola
The idea of Reciprocity is central for your practice. Can you tell us a little more about where it comes from? In times of social distancing and isolation, how do you perceive the possibilities of exchange between people?
I think of choreography in terms of relationships (between body tissues, between people, between humans, and more–than–human entities). The question of “what kind of relationship we produce and reproduce through our practices”? is an important question for me. My intuition is that reciprocity would be a way of relating that allows us to move out of unidirectional and binary logics (active-passive, theory-practice, to name a few). Perhaps these times of pandemic, more than ever, highlight the fact that we are co-involved in the world, we cannot think about our movements and practices without paying attention to the effects they have on others, on the common environment. I think of this as a potentiality. I think of reciprocity as a tool to avoid reproducing logics of domination, oppression, or extractivism. And this, I believe, is the great task of our time.
As a choreographer, how do you see the possibilities of the movement and interaction for the future? How do you perceive the interaction between body and space, and what arethe responsibilities that come with it, especially, when we think about the way in wich work and environment coexists?
I am aware that the experience of “this moment” is not the same in every context, in everybody, but there is certainly something shared about the interruption of a supposed “normality”: the isolations, the extreme control of the movement of bodies in the public space, the increase of “online” life (as if it were the only option) moulding with its pre-established formats ways of feeling and thinking.
As a choreographer, I wonder (and try to put it into practice) if we will manage to make the construction of these choreographies (micro and macro movements) a collective gesture of care, solidarity, and social justice, and not just leave it to the will of protocols. I wonder if we will manage to invent ways of encountering and sharing outside the “online” formats of control and surveillance. I wonder if we will manage to take advantage of this state of “de-normalization”, to acknowledge and renounce privileges, and to practice other form of relationship between humans and more–than–humans. I think art is a place where to train that.
About Amparo González Sola
