Work in Progress: Mani-bonding-festo

Welcome to the work in progress sharing moment and conversation around Mani-bonding-festo on Friday September 11.

Mani-bonding-festo is an artistic research project exploring togetherness and collectivity. How do people imagine, practice, and reinvent togetherness and collectivity in the current times? Searching for answers and on an expedition to listen to the voices of others, Maria invites people into a manicure session: Mani - the nail salon sessions. By holding their hands, she commits to sense the other’s otherness. The hands become a site for encountering the other through touch, weight, texture, temperature and smell. The conversations generated in these encounters will be the starting point for Festo. In Festo - dancing together, Maria works on translating aspects of Mani through a choreographic and performative vantage point.

This week at workspacebrussels, together with dance artist Víctor Pérez Armero, Maria Ferreira Silva will dive into Festo by deepening the relation between two bodies. Together they'll experiment with scores and somatic experiments that explore touch, interdependence, intimacy, and resistance.

Maria Ferreira Silva (1988) is a Brussels based dance artist. She engages with the artistic field through entanglements, reflecting on the intersection of the roles she embodies on and off stage. Maria’s dance education began at the age of six, performing in her hometown in shows organized by her dance teacher Fernanda Mafra, followed by the National Conservatory of Lisbon, P.A.R.T.S. (with the support from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), and Uniarts (NPP program) in Stockholm.