Cuqui Jerez
Cuqui Jerez is an artist, choreographer, and performer (Madrid/Berlin). Since her first pieces, her work has served as a tool to understand the performative act. To date, she has created performances, dances, theatre pieces, videos, texts, photographs, objects, events, and publications, yet she considers all these practices as choreographies. Her approach to all her works is choreographic, which is why she primarily identifies as a choreographer. Her main obsession is creating new realities and languages through space, time, and bodies. She is deeply focused on constructing in space, but in her work she does not separate space from time. Time enables the process of construction or transformation in space, and this space-time relationship activates language or opens the possibility of escaping from it. She is interested in generating a displacement in the spectator’s experience. The way she understands this potential displacement has evolved throughout her practice, in different ways and dimensions. In her early work, this shift occurs within a semiotic field, understanding the performative act as a system of signs that produces a situation or fiction. Later, she began to understand this act as something that moves away from meaning and references, where language is released and perception and contemplation of the world come into play. In this shift, the understanding of fiction is transformed, as it no longer represents something that exists but something that does not exist, thereby creating suggestion and new possibilities. In her most recent projects, she observes and practices the behavior of things, removing power from the figure of the performer and giving it to the “things,” creating landscapes in motion, observing the performativity of materiality, and offering the spectator a contemplative state where hyper-attention, expectation, suspense, and emotion come into play.
