Elvira Santamaria (Mexico)

VISITING INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ARTISTS WORKSHOP
School of the Museum of Fine Arts public performance

Sunday March 11, 3pm

Admission free; donations accepted

This program is a culmination of Elvira Santamaria’s five-day workshop, and interactions with SMFA performance students
Adina Bier, Tara Hill, Faith Johnson, Genevieve Johnson, Sabri Reed, Rebecca Scheckman and Richard Spartos.

Elvira Santamaría (Mexico) was born in 1967. She studied Painting at the ENPEG (National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving), La Esmeralda.  Since 1991 she has presented her performances at different international festivals: Nippon International Art Performance Festival (NIPAF) in Japan; Rencontre International d'Art Performance in Quebec; Trans-Europe 2000 in Hanover, Germany; International Review of Live Art in Scotland and in Blurrr Biennial of Performance Art in Israel in 2001 and others. She has also shown her work in public spaces, museums, galleries and theatres of Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, USA and Europe.  She received the scholarship “Jóvenes Creadores” (“young creators”) from the FONCA (National Fund for Culture and Arts) in 1997. She made two art residencies in Quebec in 1995 and 2002. 

Since 2000, she has been a member of the performance art group Black Market International.  Her work presently focuses on intervention and process art. In 2001, she initiated and organized the event “Acciones en Ruta” (Actions in Route). She curate and coordinated the “Mexico-Japan Performance Art Encounter” in 2002.  At the moment, she continuous developing her artwork, giving workshops and organizing performance events such as the International Performance Encounter in Yucatan.

DESCRIPTION OF WORKSHOP
“Personal Rituals”

"Social behaviour is ordered by social rituals, which give us limited ways to live and view the reality.  “Reality is the image we make about it.” 
Creativity is not the faculty to create exclusively art, but it is the faculty of every human being to create themselves; to find the existential image, act and attitude to transmit into this world. 

I propose for this workshop to try to find the images, acts and attitudes that any kind of malaise (anxiety, depressions, loneliness) or the necessity to be playful and discover the richness and lust of life demand us.  We will do exercises and develop a final performance presentation.  I will include myself in the presentation.

• The act as an ephemeral image that works in the unconscious level as a symbolic language.
• The creation contexts of Action Art as ephemeral cells of social transformation or as ephemeral societies.
• The risk in action art as a healing ( balance, harmony) element.
• The symbol in action art as a personal language without message. The message is built by the receptor, first receptor: the unconscious of the actionist, then the unconscious of the witnesses.  Feelings as the expression of the event. "