dance performance by Silvia Ospina
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in the frame of BRUMANSIA, at CORDILLERA Berlin.
December 2024
Photo: ©Carlos Collado
ANUNCIA EN EL PEDREGAL is a multi-symbolic dance piece that explores the archetype of the mother—both in her dimension as Mother Earth and in universal symbolic figures such as Mary—to construct a narrative that transcends time and contemporary discourses on reproduction and gender. This work aims to foster understanding and connection through movement and imagery, creating a meeting space that evokes the mystery of life itself.
At the heart of this piece, the image of the vulva emerges as a powerful symbol: the primordial place of pleasure, origin, and the fertilizing source of life, sex, and the earth. This sacred symbol reaffirms the intimate connection between the female body, the earth, and perpetual creation. The work visually and conceptually dialogues with Frida Kahlo’s painting “Roots in the Pedregal,” where the female body appears fertile, planted in dry, arid earth, evoking the fertile capacity of women even in adverse conditions.
ANUNCIA EN EL PEDREGAL not only honors the reproductive function of women but also makes visible the political and erotic dimension of that act. In a world marked by capitalist logics that try to appropriate the female body, the piece vindicates motherhood, care, and pleasure as essential acts that go beyond feminism and opposition to subjugation.
Taking into account Silvia Federici’s ideas, who states that “the last frontier of capitalism is the female body,” this piece deepens the vital importance of reproduction from a critical and political perspective, showing how the female body is a battleground and a space of resistance. The work reveals how the mother’s body, in all its complexity, not only sustains biological life but also challenges and resists the cultural and economic impositions that seek to control and commodify it.
Through symbols, gestures, bodily and emotional landscapes, the dance invites reflection on the maternal and sexual body as sacred and resistant spaces, capable of giving life, protecting, loving, and challenging the hegemonic system. It is a space where the strength and creative power inherent to being a woman in her reproductive, sexual, and social functions manifest.
Thus, this work represents a call to recognize the complexity and power of the female body beyond traditional perceptions, opening a dialogue between individual experience, collective history, and current struggles for autonomy, gender justice, and the right to pleasure.
She is always on the move.
If there is excitement, she is there.
If there is commotion, she is there.
If there is elation, she is there.
If there is impatience, she is there.
If there is tiredness, she is there.
Fear, restlessness, sadness, beauty, inspiration, she is there. She has shown us the way back, because we don’t know how to plant, what little is left of us.
We are the children of dreamers, we are the children of martyrs, we are the last seed covered in blood, but we will rise and live again, we will always find ways to multiply, to be on earth, as we spin through the skies, in her arms.
SILVIA OSPINA | KÖRPER & MEDIUM 