I explore the body as geography- political and tectonic, hydric and watery, uncanny and fragmented, sensuous and grotesque. My work has been driven by the existential quest of an affected-affective corpus where issues of gender, spirituality, animality, migration, otherness, and colonialism have emerged. Acknowledging our relations and our 'being in the World' as intersubjective and intercorporeal, my work explores the soma-politics of the encounter providing new spaces for negotiation to occur. Under the scope of ways of decolonising the body-geographies (de-linking from internal colonialism), I engage in forms of "sensorial activism" exploring relational tensions (human and more-than-human), interspecies kinship, capacities of co-sensing otherwise, rites of passage, modes of resistance and belonging, the body's legal implications, and patriarchy's roles and masquerades.
In my work the interrelationality with the "object" is understood as another matter-spirit that encounters my own in a dialogue of bodies where layers of affect-effect are constantly produced from this encountering. Through this interaction, our sensorial memories caress and are the pulsations that become (devenir) the action. Tensions and recognitions, functionalities and alternative associations, and an exchange between the absence/presence of materiality in relation to the presence/absence of one-Self are some of the explorations triggered. Traces of the encounter become the liminal reality of a third space created in a specific time (duration)-place (site). Human/non-human; subject/object; alive/dead; communal/individual are some of the dichotomies that become blurred.
RAÍCES CON ALAS Amor&Rabia... +lucha / +magia
In my work the interrelationality with the "object" is understood as another matter-spirit that encounters my own in a dialogue of bodies where layers of affect-effect are constantly produced from this encountering. Through this interaction, our sensorial memories caress and are the pulsations that become (devenir) the action. Tensions and recognitions, functionalities and alternative associations, and an exchange between the absence/presence of materiality in relation to the presence/absence of one-Self are some of the explorations triggered. Traces of the encounter become the liminal reality of a third space created in a specific time (duration)-place (site). Human/non-human; subject/object; alive/dead; communal/individual are some of the dichotomies that become blurred.
RAÍCES CON ALAS Amor&Rabia... +lucha / +magia
I am a performance and visual artist, curator, researcher and pedagogue. I have been trained by performance art practice, organisation, history and theory. I am co-director of the performance art space for creation and radical pedagogy, MATERIC.ORG. I am professor at the University of Puerto Rico and at the Escola Massana of Art and Design (Barcelona). I hold a BA in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in Curatorial Studies, with a focus on Latin American performance art from the University of Essex, U.K. and a PhD in Art History and Theory from the same university.
I have presented artwork in Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, Greece, Spain, Finland, Cyprus, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Martinique, Ireland and the United Kingdom: in the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Puerto Rico, ViVa! Art Action, Live Art Development Agency, La Muga Caula festival, FEM, University of Rostock, Tacheles Kunsthaus, Cell63, Biennal DEFORMES, PerfoArtNet Bienal Internacional de Performance, Festival Arte y Decolonialidad Abya Yala (Museo Colonial, Bogota), Festival Performe-se: Fronteiras Borradas/Fronteiras Erguidas (Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória) among others, as well as in the suburban flow of the public sphere in San Juan (colonial and post-modern), San Germán, Barcelona, Madrid, Zurich and Berlin.
Since 2015 I live the art-life project Marina Barsy Janer x Isil Sol Vil / Isil Sol Vil x Marina Barsy Janer based on subversive Love and eXtreme Care (amOr Subversivo/ Cuidados eXtremos). Together with Isil Sol Vil we present performance art, installations, and audiovisual work. We have also developed a pedagogical line and share several curatorial projects. I have also collaborated with companies and artists’ collectives such as Ocells al Cap, Hincapié, Casa Cruz de la Luna, reENCARNAción, Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx, and CORPOLOGIA, among others. Some of the artists I have had the pleasure of co-creating new worlds through art include Gonzalo Rabanal, Awilda Rodríguez Lora (La Performera), Laura Corcuera, Ainoa Mela López, Paloma Orts, Graciela Contreras Guzmán, Źmicier Jurkievič, Jimena Lloreda and Efraín del Hierro. I have also had the immense honor of accompanying the artistic processes of the activists of the Sindihogar/Sindillar union of caregivers and domestic workers.
As an art facilitator and organiser, in 2020-21 I co-curated MAR DE ISLAS performance encounter of the Caribbean. In 2020 I was in the curatorial committee of Latidoamérica Extendida: Europa as part of the Continuo Latidoamericano de Performance. I co-curated the second edition of EMPREMTA festival internacional de performance in 2017 that invited 2 artists per day to develop a performance with a same material. I organised DECOLONIAL ACTIONS (2016) with the support of the Live Art Development Agency, where performance actions by international artists where presented as a starting point for a communal discussion on the current topics of everyday forms of colonialism. In 2013 I organised ‘MIND THE GAP: performative-symposium’, an event that bridged academic discourse on performance and artistic performance practice with venues in firstsite visual arts centre, U.K. and the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art. I was co-editor of the journal ARARA, Art and Architecture of the Americas for its 12th Issue on 'The Poetics and Politics of Humour in Contemporary Art of the Americas' and have worked for the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America-ESCALA as project assistant during the time where ESCALA organised the exhibition of dominican performer David Pérez karmadavis together with the symposium 'Art and Politics in the Hispaniola'.
I have presented artwork in Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, Greece, Spain, Finland, Cyprus, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Martinique, Ireland and the United Kingdom: in the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Puerto Rico, ViVa! Art Action, Live Art Development Agency, La Muga Caula festival, FEM, University of Rostock, Tacheles Kunsthaus, Cell63, Biennal DEFORMES, PerfoArtNet Bienal Internacional de Performance, Festival Arte y Decolonialidad Abya Yala (Museo Colonial, Bogota), Festival Performe-se: Fronteiras Borradas/Fronteiras Erguidas (Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória) among others, as well as in the suburban flow of the public sphere in San Juan (colonial and post-modern), San Germán, Barcelona, Madrid, Zurich and Berlin.
Since 2015 I live the art-life project Marina Barsy Janer x Isil Sol Vil / Isil Sol Vil x Marina Barsy Janer based on subversive Love and eXtreme Care (amOr Subversivo/ Cuidados eXtremos). Together with Isil Sol Vil we present performance art, installations, and audiovisual work. We have also developed a pedagogical line and share several curatorial projects. I have also collaborated with companies and artists’ collectives such as Ocells al Cap, Hincapié, Casa Cruz de la Luna, reENCARNAción, Teatro en Movimiento Callejerx, and CORPOLOGIA, among others. Some of the artists I have had the pleasure of co-creating new worlds through art include Gonzalo Rabanal, Awilda Rodríguez Lora (La Performera), Laura Corcuera, Ainoa Mela López, Paloma Orts, Graciela Contreras Guzmán, Źmicier Jurkievič, Jimena Lloreda and Efraín del Hierro. I have also had the immense honor of accompanying the artistic processes of the activists of the Sindihogar/Sindillar union of caregivers and domestic workers.
As an art facilitator and organiser, in 2020-21 I co-curated MAR DE ISLAS performance encounter of the Caribbean. In 2020 I was in the curatorial committee of Latidoamérica Extendida: Europa as part of the Continuo Latidoamericano de Performance. I co-curated the second edition of EMPREMTA festival internacional de performance in 2017 that invited 2 artists per day to develop a performance with a same material. I organised DECOLONIAL ACTIONS (2016) with the support of the Live Art Development Agency, where performance actions by international artists where presented as a starting point for a communal discussion on the current topics of everyday forms of colonialism. In 2013 I organised ‘MIND THE GAP: performative-symposium’, an event that bridged academic discourse on performance and artistic performance practice with venues in firstsite visual arts centre, U.K. and the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art. I was co-editor of the journal ARARA, Art and Architecture of the Americas for its 12th Issue on 'The Poetics and Politics of Humour in Contemporary Art of the Americas' and have worked for the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America-ESCALA as project assistant during the time where ESCALA organised the exhibition of dominican performer David Pérez karmadavis together with the symposium 'Art and Politics in the Hispaniola'.