DATE: February 22, 2025
LOCATION: El Centro Hispano
TIME: 4:00pm
Dance MFA candidate, Natalia Cervantes, warmly invites you to welding borderlands | soldando las tierras fronterizas, a community journey comprised of four layers: a migration, an immersive installation, a sharing of welding, and a celebration. welding is a layered practice that physicalizes seemingly intangible borderlands, or third/in-between spaces, through the body in motion to make them more accessible to process. The borderlands of focus are between bodies, materials, generations, memories, and more.
Begin by entering a living archive that inspires welding with tender warmth and reminiscence during a brief bus migration to the main venue. Upon arrival, you will be greeted by an extension of this living archive, where a welding sharing will gradually emerge. A vibrant celebration filled with food, music, dancing, connecting, and reflecting will follow. Along and beyond this journey, you are invited to reconnect with generational memory, reflect on personal archival practices, and celebrate in community.
Artist’s Statement
The pillars of my creative process are storytelling, vulnerability, imagination, and community. These anchors guide my multimedia artistic approach that allows me to process embodied investigations in a nonlinear fashion. The multiple creative avenues involved in my process include, but are not limited to, dancing, blackout poetry, collaging, writing, painting, photography, and video and sound editing. The traces of my multimedia creative process form a living archive of artifacts that inspire my movement explorations, where I unravel the memories held within the archive of the body.
My artistry is fueled by my Latina identity and my fascination with borderlands, or third/in-between spaces. To explore the borderlands across bodies, materials, generations, and memories, I have developed a practice called welding. welding is a layered investigation of embodied translation that prioritizes how my body immediately reacts to personally or culturally significant artifacts. This is followed by a movement processing of a video recording from the initial exploration. welding is a long-term practice, as it can continue for an unlimited number of layers and can re-engage any artifacts accumulated over time. I am invested in this practice and beyond to make space for diverse Latinx experiences in the United States and to celebrate the vibrancy of our community.