Carolina Mendonça & Lara Ferrari - Zones of Resplendence

This performance is part of the performance series INSIDE WOUNDS.

Zones of Resplendence explores forms of manifestation for a potential feminized army. Carolina Mendonça and Lara Ferrari investigate whether you can fight a war with vulnerability, expanding the perspective on violence. By using the body in different ways, they prepare themselves for a possible confrontation. Will this sci-fi dance performance give rise to a new kind of army?

Their bodies are resplendent, holding both senses of the word: extremely radiant and what appears in the aftermath of an explosion. By means of a form that rehearses an embodied political sensibility, they engage with resplendence as a tactic to investigate and address a different language for violence.

direction, text & performance Carolina Mendonça | performance & collaboration Lara Ferrari | external coaches Carolina Bianchi & Joshua Wicke | sound design Miguel Caldas | lighting design Laura Salerno & Leticia Scrycky | costume design Miguel Peñaranda Olmeda & Stefania Assandri | supported by radical hope, hot bodies studio, wpZimmer, workspacebrussels, Fonds Darstellende Künste in the frame of the programme NEUSTART KULTUR #TakeHeart Residenzförderung

Carolina Mendonça is interested in contamination of knowledge and in being vulnerable to different logics. She holds a Master in Choreography and Performance at Giessen University in Germany and graduated in Performing Arts at ECA-USP. Her latest projects are: Sirens (2021), an attempt to compose a dissonant choir at Belluard; Pulp-History as a Warm Wet Place (2018), which deals with an intuitive archeology digesting the leftovers of the XVII-XVIII centuries; a useless land (2018), in which Carolina and Catalina Insignares propose a night reading that invites de audience to sleep in different contexts such as Maerzmusik in Berlin, Ferme de Buisson in Paris, Beursschouwburg in Brussels and Sesta in Prague; We, the Undamaged others (2017), which puts in question happiness as a horizon that organizes our lives and which premiered at Oswald de Andrade in São Paulo and was shown in MIT-2018.

Carolina develops a practical theoretical research, which she shares in the workshop Impossible Practices. The workshop deals with telepathy, levitation and deep listening and was presented at exerce (Montpellier), Tabakalera (Donostia), NIDO (Rivera), HfmdK (Frankfurt) and Teerã National Theater (Teheran).

Carolina was one of the curators of the Performing Arts Festival VERBO (2017) at Galeria Vermelho and Temporada de Dança (2017) at Videobrasil, both in São Paulo. She also works as a dramaturg with Marcelo Evelin, Marcela Santander, Dudu Quintanilha, Carolina Bianchi, Volmir Cordeiro and others.

Lara Ferrari – tummma has a Master in Spatial & Visuals Arts from ISAC, Belgium & Lic. and graduated with a degree in Choreographic Composition from UNA, Argentina. 

Her practice focuses on performance and writing as activators that generate states of empathy, vulnerability and fragility in the body. Working from the commitment to think from affections and sensitive practices as a politics that enables dissimilar perceptive modes and builds other ways of relating to each other and to the environment.

Since 2017 she has been working with Josefina Imfeld in the collective Métodos de supervivencia, developing performative practices and fragile encounters. Their current work Synchronization Practice, a practice for a remote encounter, counts with the support of the Metropolitan Found of Arts (Arg) and won the National Found of Arts (Arg) for the creation of a book to share these practices.

In her writing she is currently working with a fragmented narrative where stories of the huge crisis of December 2001 in Argentina are mixed and intertwined with stories from the Guaraní culture.

Currently she works in collaboration with Carolina Mendonça in Zones of resplendence, work that was presented in El Caldo, Gessnerallee (Ch) as work in process. And with Cathrin Jarema developing Part 1: A black hole of deception presented in L’estruch (Es), De Markten and Volksroom (Bru).