Artist statement
Sérgio Diogo Matias (1985, Lisbon).
As a creator I feel that my universe contains a mixture of influences. Perhaps because throughout my journey I have been absorbing knowledge in various artistic domains and they all feed my creative processes. I’m particularly interested in creating universes that mix all these information fields, which are articulated creating new realities, or hybrid realities, leading people to question the functioning of the body. My work has a strong plastic component, which enhances this illusionism, through sculptural costumes, which inform and build the dramaturgy of the body, making it illusory bigger or even making the body disappear.
The search for this transversal reality, for a surrealistic or misshapen body, is a reflection of me as a person and the place where I grew up and built myself socially. Living on the south bank, in Barreiro, has always given me a feeling of “not belonging”. The truth is that I have always lived in a dynamic of transition and uncertainty, due to the hours lost in no one’s places, like the boat that crosses the river. Suddenly that boat is also your home, but it’s a place of immobile urgency, something that gives me a feeling of not being there, not even here. Because it is not a tour, but a ritual journey. Everyday. These transitional places, as I call them, are common for those who live around the big cities. It started with the buses, later the boat, then the train… Hence my interest in the hybrid places of the body, deep down I’m interested in this transition of information between two points, whether through the relationship of the body with one object or with the other. It is the confrontation between the emotionality of this relationship, but also its functional side and how everything can converge to the same focus.
The construction of this varied and sometimes chaotic imaginary begins at the age of 18 with the so-called boat trips to Lisbon when I enter the Architecture of Design course at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon. Two years later, my travels increased, when I decided to go to the Visual Arts course at the University of Évora, because I was fed up with traveling in the periphery. Then I realized that somewhere else there was another periphery, and that I had gone to a periphery further away from the periphery where I was.
Finally, it was only in 2008 and 2010 that I entered the Interpretation/Creation degree at the Superior Dance School – Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon and I returned to boat trips, but this time I already knew them well and in the final year of the degree I attended ArteZ Hogeeschool in Arnhem through the Erasmus Program scholarship. From the second year of my degree, I start my professional work as a performer in the piece EGOSKIN, by Amélia Bentes, with whom I have worked continuously.
In 2013/2014 I am a student of the course at Forum Dança, PEPCC and it is from here that I start to deepen my journey as a creator. In parallel to my work as a creator, I have always collaborated with other choreographers as a performer, including Amélia Bentes, Miguel Pereira, Vânia Rovisco (EQUANIMIDADE, 2017), Henrique Furtado (DIÁLOGOS, 2021), among others. Also, in 2014 I was co-creator of PASTICHE, a project financed by the grant program to support dance creation by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 2017 I present the piece MASS|MESS, premiered at the Paralelo Festival, in the Azores. Still in 2017, I present my solo constructed during the Forum Dança course, at Festival Cartografias, curated by Ezequiel Santos. In 2018 I am co-creator, with António Torres, of the play GEMINIS and I am also the creator of the play LOOP. These projects were supported by the GDA Foundation and premiered in 2019, at Teatro da Politécnica – Artistas Unidos and Rua das Gaivotas 6, respectively.
In 2020 I revisit the premises that gave rise to my work Insólido, looking for a new approach to this concept, at the invitation of André Guedes to premiere at the Cumplicidades Festival, 2020.
In the pandemic year 2020/2021 I decided to deepen my knowledge in the area of singing and musical composition and I joined the Composition and Musical Performance course at the Restart school. My main creative motivations are the conjunction of this entire personal and professional path and are the search for states through structured improvisations, submitting the body to external or internal conditions, which often can limit it at first sight, but which can also open to other possibilities of the functioning of the body. From this first impulse, I go search for creative stimuli, while at the same time I am paying attention to chance and spontaneity. Basically, it’s the combination of all these stimuli that puts me in places of not knowing, of trying to articulate what doesn’t fit in the first place.