PONCILI CREACIÓN
SEMILLAS
Free access
PONCILI CREACIÓN
in collaboration with inmates from Tenerife and students from Modatex
Live Music: Tito Frito, Pedro Alves Sousa and António Feiteira
Semillas began with a series of anti-colonial dramaturgy workshops at Tenerife II Penitentiary Center in Tenerife (Spain), developed in collaboration with AFES Salud Mental, an organisation that works with people experiencing mental health issues both inside and outside prison.
The process aimed to inspire each participant to create a character drawn from their own experiences and, subsequently, to develop possible acts of theatrical protest of their own devising.
The collection of ideas and sketches gathered during these workshops crossed the ocean to Porto, in Portugal, where they found their way into the hands of students at Modatex, a professional school for the textile, clothing and garment industry. In their workshop spaces, these creative hands and minds took on the task of bringing these imaginary beings — originally conceived by the workshop participants in the penitentiary centre — into the physical world, using their drawings and descriptive texts as designs and working guides.
This evening presentation at Serralves is enriched by the alchemy resulting from the collaboration between the stories and imaginary beings conceived by the workshop participants in a prison on an Atlantic archipelago and the handiwork of fashion design and production students from the nearby Iberian peninsula.
Following this event, these imagined beings will travel to Tenerife, where further performances will take place — including TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife II Penitentiary Center, and other venues across the island — allowing new creative communities and audiences to encounter, activate and transform them.
"Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency(EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them”
Related
Poncili Creación is a performance duo formed by twin Porto Rican brothers Pablo and Efraín Del Hierro, that uses large scale transformative sculpture, raw magic and visceral energy to plunge its audiences into a whimsical nightmare with unpredictable outcomes. By creating a myriad of flexible sculptures out of found materials, to be animated and brought to life by the human body or parts of it, Poncili Creación transforms primitive puppetry and idol-making into a shape-shifting art form highly effective for bringing impossible ideas into reality. They present a well calibrated intermixtures of ritual and showmanship, they put forth an alternative state of reality where these sculptures, some as small as coins, others as large as buses, become tools for creating willful power that deforms reality. Identifying as nomadic, they have embraced mobility as a way to build connections and activate shared imagination. Their trajectory over the past decade has placed them increasingly within the European cultural landscape, where they have toured, collaborated, been in residency and created work. Their spectacles and workshop tours have taken them to Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, U.S., Mexico, Dominican Republic, Malaysia, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and China. Their work has been featured in Moma-PS1, Hauser and Wirth-LA, Aspen Art Museum, the Center for Puppetry Arts, Bienal du art off Norm, NADA (NY, Miami), Material Art Fair, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Los Angeles (ICALA), RISING, among other institutions, backyards and bathrooms.