As part of Festival Sâlmon, Isabel de Naverán will hold a conversation with Ola Maciejewska about her practice, which will pick up on and extend the long-standing correspondence they have maintained since de Naverán curated Maciejewska’s Loïe Fuller: Research in Madrid and Bilbao in 2018, and after the recent presentation of FIGURY (przestrzenne) at Estudio V. En el hueco acontece, a program curated by Isabel de Naverán (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2023).
Ola Maciejewska born in Poland and based in France, is a dancer, artist and choreographer. Her work is anchored on frictions between materiality and ephemerality, movement and its conditions of appearance. In light of these questions, she produced critical reading of the history of dance. Through working on convergences between dance and visual art, her series of works focalised on serpentine dances invented by Loie Fuller engage the viewer in reflection on metamorphosis, synesthesia, and the hybrid nature of embodiment. Her work have been presented all over Europe, in the US and in Asia. In 2022, Maciejewska received a fellowship from Watermill Center founded by Robert Wilson, as well as became an artist associated with the project ‘Campement artistique pour littoral’, in the frame of the program Mondes Nouveaux by Ministère de la Culture. The same year FIGURY (przestrzenne) – premiere in 2022 at CNDC Angers – received Gallery Award from Nadežda Petrović Gallery in Čačak / Serbia, which will lead to a solo exhibition in 2025. She is currently working on a new production for 2025 for 5 performers (supported by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels).
Isabel de Naverán researches at the intersection of art, contemporary choreography and performance through curatorial projects, editing and writing. The concern with the passage and use of time is at the backbone of her research, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in Art from the University of the Basque Country. She is part of the research group Artea, in Madrid. In 2010 she founded, together with Beatriz Cavia, Miren Jaio and Leire Vergara, Bulegoa Zenbaki Barik – Office of art and knowledge – in Bilbao, a project in which she was involved until 2018. Since 2017 she has worked as a curator of dance and performance in the Department of Public Activities of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, a position she combines this work with her tenure as an associate researcher at Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, where she is developing La ola en la mente (2021-2023) a proposal focused on somatic writing as a form of curation. In 2022 she published her first books: Envoltura, historia y síncope (Caniche editorial) and Ritual de duelo (editorial consonni), which represents a strong emphasis on her writing practice. Ritual de duelo was a finalist on the longlist for the Finestres de Narrativa Award in Spanish in 2022.