Living Arts Series: Las formas blandas 

Las formas blandas (The Soft Forms) is a platform featuring artists from various disciplines, including performance, expanded dance, and sound art. The pieces will be accompanied by conversations between artists and cultural agents from diverse fields.

From July 25 to November 23, 2024, six works and four talks will be presented by artists including Regina José Galindo (Guatemala City, Guatemala); Juan Carlos Palma (Mexico City, Mexico); Israel Martínez, Milo Medina, and Arrogante Albino (Guadalajara, Mexico); as well as Vera Garat, Tamara Gómez, and Natalia Viroga (Montevideo, Uruguay).

Saliva sliding food down the esophagus. Blood flow coursing through veins. Synovial fluid lubricating the joints between bones. Cerebrospinal fluid slowly descending through the spine. The aqueous torrent of fascia moving beneath the skin and through the muscles. These flows melt within the body, shaping a soft presence and performativity, bringing forth a gentle dissent—one that has transformed the way artists think about and create body arts.

Softness in Live Arts expands the conventions of traditional artistic production, transforming the performance space into embodied acts that appeal to collective experiences, ranging from agency to corporeal solidarity.

The Soft Forms series features artists working from this perspective, questioning the normativity of bodies and hegemonic modes of representation, dismantling traditional performance formats to bring forth the presence of the living, the fragile, and the unheard. Through ethical actions that involve exposing their own vulnerability while working with testimonies, these artists explore performance, expanded dance, and sound art, rethinking the relationship between performing bodies, witnessing bodies, and the museum itself. This constellation of works invites us to consider how these counter-narratives allow us to envision new possibilities for our bodies.

Olga Gutiérrez