© Joana Linda
Artist statement
I was born in 1983, Aveiro, Portugal. I am a theatre maker and a performer based in Lisbon whose work articulates different artistic fields, such as Theatre, Performance, Cinema and Video. In 2007, I graduated as a performer and theatre maker at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon). In 2018, I graduated at DAS Master of Theatre (DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam), with the support of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian’s Grant.
My work addresses the notion of theatre as a place to attend with all senses, by building haptic spaces. Spaces that operate through touch or where different senses are translated into touch through synesthesia and metonymy. I have been researching alternative modes of overcoming / dealing with the subject/object binary and the implications of the centrality of vision in the reiteration of a fetishist dynamic between audience and performer.
In the last years, I have been developing a practice of generating works as a way of encountering people. This research consists in creating encounters as situations in-between commonality and performativity. This encounter-based research frequently takes the format of the workshop as a tool to frame the encounter, but not exclusively.
After concluding my studies in Amsterdam, I came back to Portugal where my work was strongly motivated by the desire to continue the research on gestures of encountering. In 2019, I created “Matéria”, an open studio for sharing artistic practices, with monthly encounters in Lisbon, which also included a podcast with interviews (“2 dedos de matéria”). It was a space for each guest artist to share their modes of doing and thinking, the questions related to their current works. It also opened a space for those practices that are usually excluded, due to different contingencies, from the process of production of a performance or an artistic object.
I am currently working on the piece “The songs we sing against the walls we clean”, which is a participatory work with women, where we aim at creating a collective space of listening and tuning with the voices, emotions and biographies of each woman that participates. I am interested in developing the relationship between voice, body and vulnerability, deconstructing the discourse that visibility should be associated with an idea of strength, potency, and clarity.
A strong component of my work is its site-specific dimension, as I like to generate situated research processes, from the idea of encountering a specific place /community / people and allowing this to affect the form of the piece. Frequently, each research creates a proliferation of different artistic objects that manifest the project in different temporalities and modalities, beyond the stage performance: podcasts, video, text, albums.