matéria leve / Cycle 2026

On Image and Imagination in the Performing Arts

What is an image? What materialities compose it? What is its performativity? What does each image work toward? How do we inhabit visuality through the performing arts? What tools can we develop from the performing arts to denormalize attention?

Within the context of matéria leve, we understand stage works as invitations to a singular situation of attention. The places that emerge from each work open up as fields of images: not only to be read through a narrative logic, but as territories where new states of perception and imagination may be activated. In this sense, we take performative practices as a fertile ground for the experimentation, training, and destabilization of the logics that configure attention as the most valuable commodity of contemporary capitalism.

To think the image beyond a cause-and-effect relationship implies recognizing that it neither exhausts itself nor functions as a point of arrival. Each image can become part of an imagining process if we understand the performing arts as a space where attention can be trained and undomesticated. It is within this attentive practice that the image may emancipate itself from representation and, in encounter with the spectators, unfold toward other images in a movement that is not linear but electric and affective.

matéria leve is a platform for research and training in stage lighting where we have been experimenting with collaborative and experimental pedagogical contexts. It emerged as a space directed toward cis women, trans people, and non-binary people, with the desire to open fields of work and dialogue where they previously did not exist.

In this cycle, we collaborate with colleagues from different disciplines who approach the image through its performative capacity: artists and researchers who understand the stage as an encounter of non-hierarchical agencies; creators who work with light as a living material that generates space-time and as an autonomous field of inquiry; researchers who expand our understanding of visuality through artistic and pedagogical practice.

Participants: Andrea Soto Calderón, Victoria Pérez Royo, Emse Csornai, Laura Salerno, Josefa Pereira, Ska Batista, Bee Barros, Gabriela Cavería, Ayara Hernández, Cecilia Mieres, Leticia Skrycky, and Carolina Campos,among others.

In a present violently traversed by so many questions, we place our trust in the creative power of art as a practice of political imagination: a place where images do not close meaning, but open possibilities.

Leticia Skrycky and Carolina Campos