Gestural Topographies

A word from professeur florence figols: 

FOFA Gallery Collaboration

At the intersection of dance and visual arts, this collaborative project invites students to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue. How can one artist’s process trigger and stimulate the process of another’s, working in a different medium? At the beginning of this journey visual arts students, participating in the next FOFA Gallery Undergraduate Student Exhibition, encountered third year contemporary dance students in their Creative Process class. And at the end of this journey, students’ dance performance creations unfold in cohabitation within the exhibition. We are diving into the complexity and simplicity of an encounter - from being affected by the other while nurturing own’s artistic process to the juxtaposition of different temporalities, different materiality, here always in dialogue.

For this new edition, the notion of “collaboration has been reimagined; instead of presenting their selected artwork visual arts students were invited, at first, to share and describe verbally their creative journey - intentions, inspirations and the process involved in the making. Dance students were engaged in listening rather than seeing, exposed to the richness of all the layers that are normally kept in silence, not accessible at first glance, shifting visual cues into acoustic ones. The object of their creation kept in invisibility, at least at the first stages of the exchange, allowed dance artists to access the multiplicity of stories and histories that participated in shaping the visual artwork. By encountering different ways of doing and other media, points of friction, resonance and imagination are embodied. Collaboration unfolds “in conversation”, investing new territories for creativity, re-mapping movement emergence, pushing further aspects of embodiment, dance-creation and performance.

Affected by the pandemic, all involved artists are adapting to new challenges compressing the three-dimensionality of their work; from materiality into virtuality, from cells into pixels. This edition is one of going one step at the time, shifting medium, revisiting planning, creating new bearings and scanning possibilities for the diffusion of this event, celebrating the artistic process of encountering and being in conversation, between visual arts and contemporary dance students while encouraging long term and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Many thanks to the FOFA Gallery and all the students involved in this unique adventure, an occasion to invest new ways of doing.

florence figols