ALMA QUINTANA

BIO

Alma Quintana is a Mexican choreographer and dancer. Her practice is researching different devices and settings on choreographic experience. She has mainly made solo performances in a collaborative and interdisciplinary mode with other artists. She is part of the international project Interferencias and member of Colectivo AM (Mexico City). Also teaching dance composition to children and offering workshops on choreographic practice to inquire tools, observation and working methods. In recent years she has been interested in exploring the perception and experience of the body through memory processes, multitasking directed attention and embodying various mind states.

Her work has been presented in Mexico and abroad in various theaters, forums and spaces. Currently she is developing the third and final period of her project ‘Aparición’ funded by the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA) in Mexico to disseminate the work in different countries during 2015 and conclude with the realisation of a publication.

Lutz Baumann is a visual artist working in the field of photography, film and installation. His work is based on site-specific projects. Interviews, historical research and excursions often become an important source for his final outcomes. Immediate reality is an important element in his work that is addressed to the nature of what we
see and the truth realness of it. It comprises two aspects: observing / perceiving and, at the same time, the experience of the viewer’s subjective interpretations and associations. We always
compare what we see with what we know, that is where his motivation starts.
His installations look into technologies of image production and notions of surveillance, exploring
the way different media apparatuses get employed in the service of power, resistance, and
memory.

FRAME OF RESEARCH

Aparición

with Lutz Baumann

Aparición is a choreographic project that Alma Quintana has researched since 2012. By setting different frameworks, Alma has been able to explore various presentation devices to widely approach the different concepts of the project. A starting point was to reflect on the notion of body, approached as a system, structure, and object or as something that becomes present in space. The core practice has triggered the ‘body-action’ by exploring the process and effort of recovering/remembering what just happened, while it is happening (while a body is moving or is being moved). Aparición plays with the visible and non-visible that take place on experience. It opens the question: what is it that moves?

Since the second period of the project (2014) she collaborates with the visual artist Lutz Baumann. Together they decided to work with some pieces of wood that became an important source for the instigation on the body observation and experience. They explored how the concept could split into different outcomes: a performative and a visual and then exploring how could they be linked on a memory process by the way both were experienced in time.

Along 3 years the project has two performances, an installation, one exhibition, and a publication that will be finished by the end of this year.

The residency at Bains Connective will have two directions, first to organize all the content, history and documentation of the project for the publication and second playing with a performative and visual device for its presentation.

“Proyect funded by Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes” (Mexico)