Sofia Neuparth
12 October 2023, at 18h30
Camões Library – Lisbon
Approximate duration: 2 hours
Free entry, subject to registration.
Sofia Neuparth has a unique career in Contemporary Art in Portugal. It is her understanding of the body as an event in relationship that determines all her actions, from the training work she has been doing since the early 1980s to the programming of the professional structure she co-created and directs. This is how, at the end of the 1980s, he created a space for research, experimentation, training, creation and artistic documentation that supports practices in the study of the Body, Movement and the Common: c.e.m-centro em movimento. The c.e.m organisation’s regular programming includes the Experimental Space (in existence since 1993), the work with the city since 2005 (Pedras – practices with people and places), the research / creation / training programmes (such as O Risco da Dança, FIA or DEMORA) that have been taking shape since the late 1990s, and the constant side-by-side monitoring of paths of experimentation and creation.
A teacher, researcher and creator, she nurtures the continuous reflection to which she dedicates herself, exercising the generation of possible worlds and practising Art as a fundamental form of Knowledge. Active and critical in relation to the recurrent implementation of policies (not just cultural ones) that tend to stifle the vitality of existence, she was involved in the creation of APPD (Portuguese Association for Dance) and REDE (Association of Structures for Contemporary Dance), which she co-directed for several years, continuing to be attentive and involved in the generation of implicated and vibrant ways of being.
She keeps the experience of dance open in the encounter with other forms of knowledge such as embryology or philosophy, from which creations such as ‘mmm – a physical poem’ (2005), ‘practices for seeing the invisible and keeping it a secret’ (dance-book 2010), ‘1 or 2 comedidos contentments’ (2011), or ‘Sopro’ (2017 – with Margarida Agostinho and Bruno de Azevedo) or publications (‘written in a state of dance’) such as ‘movimento’ 2014 or ‘Criação’ 2020, the latter with Margarida Agostinho, have emerged.
For more information: www.c-e-m.org
Photograph © Valentina Parravicini