Celestial Bodies Festival
Celestial Bodies – FEMALE ARTIST’S MEETING
In 2018, while attending the MFA in Performing Arts at the Iceland Academy of Arts Paula Diogo met 6 female artists from different countries and with varied artistic backgrounds (architecture, dance, theater, music, fine arts and philosophy). This group spent three semesters developing individual projects and intensively sharing work practices and processes. Together they decided to organize a mini-festival for the presentation of the final master’s projects, in August 2019 in Reykjavik. They called the festival CELESTIAL BODIES. In the Festival’s presentation text they stated the following:
“We are seven different women from seven different countries with different pathways through artistic practices and experiences. CELESTIAL BODIES is a celebration of that diversity as it reflects in a wide range of formats, questions, and methods. It is also a celebration of care, vulnerability, and taking space. CELESTIAL BODIES is a space for encounters, for arriving together and for departing on new terms.”
The experience of being for a long period in a group exclusively composed by women, sharing perspectives, universes and ideas, inevitably led to a reflection on the place of women in the performing arts. Since 2019, the group has kept in contact and it is now organizing itself as a moving platform for dialogue between women artists, calling them to share and reflect together. The first of these meetings will take place in 2021 in Portugal. This meeting intends to be a test tube for future meetings, in which methodologies and strategies will be defined, as well as practices and working methods will be shared. The proposal is, on one hand, to confront each other again as active female artists, after the master’s program ends, and on the other hand, to experience collaborations and bridges with other female artists (to be invited locally) and to create spaces for dialogue and possibilities for future collaborations.
The meetings will take place every two years in different locations, focusing each year on the host country artists.
The project CELESTIAL BODIES – FEMALE ARTIST’S MEETING aims to be transversal in terms of artistic practices, but with a special focus on the performing arts.
TEAM
Lígia Soares and Paula Diogo (curatorship for Portugal) + Ellen Vanderstraeten, Elsa Mencagli, Íris Stefanía Skúladóttir, María Arnardóttir, Nora Tormann and Zofia Tomczyk (co-curators Celestial Bodies) + Daniela Ribeiro (executive production) ) + Wilma Moutinho (technical director)
In 2018, while attending the MFA in Performing Arts at the Iceland Academy of Arts Paula Diogo met 6 female artists from different countries and with varied artistic backgrounds (architecture, dance, theater, music, fine arts and philosophy). This group spent three semesters developing individual projects and intensively sharing work practices and processes. Together they decided to organize a mini-festival for the presentation of the final master’s projects, in August 2019 in Reykjavik. They called the festival CELESTIAL BODIES. In the Festival’s presentation text they stated the following:
“We are seven different women from seven different countries with different pathways through artistic practices and experiences. CELESTIAL BODIES is a celebration of that diversity as it reflects in a wide range of formats, questions, and methods. It is also a celebration of care, vulnerability, and taking space. CELESTIAL BODIES is a space for encounters, for arriving together and for departing on new terms.”
The experience of being for a long period in a group exclusively composed by women, sharing perspectives, universes and ideas, inevitably led to a reflection on the place of women in the performing arts. Since 2019, the group has kept in contact and it is now organizing itself as a moving platform for dialogue between women artists, calling them to share and reflect together. The first of these meetings will take place in 2021 in Portugal. This meeting intends to be a test tube for future meetings, in which methodologies and strategies will be defined, as well as practices and working methods will be shared. The proposal is, on one hand, to confront each other again as active female artists, after the master’s program ends, and on the other hand, to experience collaborations and bridges with other female artists (to be invited locally) and to create spaces for dialogue and possibilities for future collaborations.
The meetings will take place every two years in different locations, focusing each year on the host country artists.
The project CELESTIAL BODIES – FEMALE ARTIST’S MEETING aims to be transversal in terms of artistic practices, but with a special focus on the performing arts.
TEAM
Lígia Soares and Paula Diogo (curatorship for Portugal) + Ellen Vanderstraeten, Elsa Mencagli, Íris Stefanía Skúladóttir, María Arnardóttir, Nora Tormann and Zofia Tomczyk (co-curators Celestial Bodies) + Daniela Ribeiro (executive production) ) + Wilma Moutinho (technical director)