Mani-bonding-festo

Mani-bonding–festo is an artistic research project exploring sustainable choreographies for co-existing. As we live through times of intense political polarisation and as digital socialisation gaslights our longing for connection, a pressing question arises: how do we collaboratively imagine, practice, and reinvent togetherness and collectivity?

Searching for answers, Maria invites volunteers into a manicure session: Mani - the nail salon sessions. By holding their hands, she commits to sense the other’s otherness. Mani invites participants into a sensorial space of dialogue through attentive co-presence. The hands become a site for encountering the other through touch, humidity, weight, texture, temperature and smell. The materials generated in these encounters will be the starting point to Festo. In Festo - dancing together, Maria will work on translating the conversations of the Mani, together with a group of dance artists, through a choreographic and performative vantage point.

Mani-bonding–festo seeks to activate forms of being-together while sitting with questions. It wishes to do so by a form of radical openness connecting through listening, observation and sensation. Which kinds of practices, scores, spatial arrangements or rituals allow people to co-exist without needing to identify as same? When could rupture be a form of resistance? What kind of relational architectures do we take for granted— in our intimate encounters, and in our social and work collaborations?