This research project is about Mimosa Pudica as an important co-operation partner. I propose to work with these plants because they are particularly sensitive to touch.
The project will focus on understanding how touch can contribute to epistemological change; and how interspecies choreography can find a way to move between sources of knowledge to unlearn colonial pedagogies.
Methodologically, the research invites movement practice, improvisation, and speculative writing based on the modes of existence of the mimosa plant. This includes the creation of performative scores informed by experiences and narratives of the plant, possibilities of learning through touch, stories of migration, and images related to captivity and botany. The aim is to understand and create tools for a 'plant-like life practice‘.
The research project seeks to develop notions of how human and non-human realms can be bridged through touch and how this can promote awareness of other ways of knowing. What past and imagined future histories can be uncovered and remembered through touch? In what ways can interspecies touch and choreography offer new imaginaries?
Being with mimosas is an attempt to choreograph configurations of worlds we cannot yet imagine and to question how and with whom we learn.
Flavia Pinheiro is a Brazilian choreographer, researcher, and performance artist currently based in Amsterdam. Her research foregrounds networks of resilience and resistance to systems of knowledge by using images and words from technology and science in order to create speculative fabulations. Using different media, she questions the complexity of colonial modernity’s ongoing process(es) in an attempt to dismantle hegemonic hierarchies.
As a teacher, Flavia worked in public universities, schools, and different institutions in Brazil facilitating body and dance practices. In 2018 she started BMC®’s Somatic Movement Educator Program at the School for Body-Mind Centering in Brazil. She graduated in Combined Arts at UNA (Argentina) and studied Art History at UNSAM (Argentina). In 2022, she graduated from the DAS Choreography Master program at Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK). Her Master's research was supported by the AHK Internationalization Fund, the AHK Talent Grant, and by the Aart Janszen Fund. Flavia Pinheiro was awarded the 3Package Deal fund for International Talents by AFK in the ‘Engaged Art’ coalition.