Joaquín Collado

I am Joaquín Collado. I grew up in Villamalea (Albacete) but now live in Barcelona. Since 2017, I have been exploring ways to expand the contours of the human, driven by the desire to embrace multiple corporealities that exist within the realms of the spatial, the monstrous, and the poetic. I am an artist—any artist—unfinished, caracolista. I dance, I move. I am a topo-dancer, mime, contortionist, buendoblador. For the past four years, I have coordinated a dance festival in my hometown. I also run an educational project with teenagers on shame and other matters. All these unfoldings allow me to imagine the artist I am becoming: made of multiple gestures, straddling high and low culture, the now and the past, the inside and the outside, the body and the wordiness.

www.joaquincollado.com
@joaquincollado_
www.festivalpaisaje.com/

Residency project

Letting oneself still float is an exercise in intimacy. An exploration of the body’s materiality, as matter, as body. Whatever a body may be. Nothing more, nothing less. A body known-unknown. Disoriented but not lost, since it comes from nowhere and is heading nowhere. It doesn’t want or seek anything. It simply is, there, left still, floating, and at the same time bearing a clear weight. Weight, fold, tone, texture. Soft-floating. And that is the only intention. It has no other purpose than simply to be, which is already a lot in times like these. It moves and takes up space as a body does, even if space is not surprised by its presence, nor it by the presence of space. It doesn’t signify. That body does not carry meaning. Its gesture is transparent. Empty, or at least without any desire to be filled. Everything in it is form. Nothing but surface. And if someone says it is this or that, that’s up to those who claim to know everything. That body knows but doesn’t know. It seems to be passing through itself. One that lands in itself every day, always still for the first time. Ellllllleelelellllalalalalaaaaaalllliiilonononon. A body without a tongue. A minor lalangue. A tongue without a mouth to house it, in any case. But oral, yes. Drooling. Babbling dance. There is no assignment in its movement. No. To bite the dance. An unresolved question, and one that remains unresolved because there’s nothing to resolve. Its hands: a piece of matter. The same goes for its arms, head. But what is a body—where does a body begin and end? One? A cuir-body, that much is true. Is it? It doesn’t behave like a man, ghost, mime, or shadow, although it may be all of those, may seem to be, or at times act as if it were. Nor does it behave like an animal, and much less like an individual—though that doesn’t mean it isn’t. It is one, yes. Simply one. A simple. Full stop…

Photography: Raúl Tramarinos

Residency archive Graner

  • 2025 · open call · Letting oneself still float
  • 2024 · with Mercat de les Flors · Hacia un sol negro
  • 2023 · with Mercat de les Flors · Hacia un sol negro
  • 2022 · crossed residency at La Briqueterie CDCN (París) in collaboration with Institut Ramon Llull · Aproximación a un sol negro
  • 2021 · open call · Zoo!
  • 2015 · in collaboration with Dansa Ara · Muerte del avestruz

Residencies videos