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Luz Arcas / La Phármaco

I am Luz Arcas, and I dedicate myself to contemporary dance, but I don’t identify with that term; I prefer others, like dancing. Folklore inspires me a lot, the collective imagination, it saves me from abstraction and connects me with something instinctive and shared. I have searched a lot outside, mostly in other continents. I have trained in India, worked in countries in Africa, America, hoping to escape from the domesticated body, from the sterility that the international style dominating the European scene aspires to. In my homeland, Andalusia, I find very strong motives; I am marked by its syncretism, by everything I have experienced there. I am not interested in brilliant ideas. My body wants to unearth, to rediscover. Dancing, a domestic miracle that arises unexpectedly, that inscribes us into a cultural community, like symbols or memory. A complex and contradictory vitality that wants to get dirty with the present, to embody new meanings in every body. What interests me is the body, its dignity. It is difficult to sustain, after all, but I live it as a debt to life. That is what I aspire to with my dance: to sublimate defeat.

www.lapharmaco.com / @luzarcaslapharmaco

Fotos de Virginia Rota

Residency project

Numerosos seréis desierto: What lies beyond dance, beyond the body, beyond its usefulness? What comes after hours of physical exhaustion, beyond sweat, beyond tears? After the first and second chapters of the trilogy, “Domestication” and “We Are War,” in which bodies rushed to the maximum of their physical and spiritual possibilities, in “Numerous you will be desert,” the bodies witness their own end, like in a landfill or a limbo of technological waste. A clean point. There’s something that has obsessed me for years, and it’s the increasingly short lifespan of objects compared to their longevity as trash. In short, thinking that most of the waste will outlive me. There’s something about this logic that extends to bodies: maximum intensity, usefulness, immediacy. And then they remain as human remnants in spaces designated for that purpose (countries or neighborhoods, landfills or limbo), curiously, the majority of the planet, the most numerous.

Residency archive Graner

  • 2023 · open call (research modality)  · Numerosos seréis desierto (Numerous you will be desert)