In ‹Bestiaire› Cecilia Bengolea explores the possibilities of envisioning hybrid species entanglements and the illusory autonomy of the human body. Morphing her own body with digital technologies of image production she sets in motion forms of becoming animal, vegetal, color, abstraction, organic and artificial in ways that deconstructs what it means to be human and where the limits between experience and representation collapse.

The piece exists both as an activated installation and an autonomous video, taking inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges Book of Imaginary Beings as well as Spinoza Philosophy of Joy and Isabelle Stengers. Bestiaire is a powerful and poetic prophesy around the urgency to engage with alternative forms of ecology beyond extractivist industrialism, techno positivism and the conviction that humanity can save the planet.

As an ongoing work that’s constantly evolving, a unique rendition will be shown in Seoul creating alternative ways of becoming other.

With and by Cecilia Bengolea
Video, courtesy of the artist, Andrehn-Schiptjenko and àngels barcelona
Co-produced by Ob/scene Festival, Idea Museum (Leeum)

Cecilia Bengolea is an Argentinian artist, dancer and choreographer active in Paris. She works with performance, video, and sculpture, using her own and other people’s bodies as animated sculptures. For Bengolea, movement, dance, and performance stand as mediums for radical empathy and emotional exchange. Making dance a collaborative, liberating practice, the artist considers moving the body to be an inventive act and a means of exorcizing violence and trauma from the body’s memory, in both personal and collective dimensions.

For the past ten years, Bengolea has extensively worked in Jamaica, collaborating with the local dancehall scene. She not only explores the role of social street dance and popular culture, but also the relationship of individual and collective bodies with nature. Bengolea seeks to create what she calls ‘harmonic communication highways’ in order to synchronize the self with the surrounding environment, landscape, and wildlife that play leading roles in her videos and sculptures.