Irene Mahugo
Encura VI residency
November 2023 - February 2024
Irene Mahugo Amaro. Madrid, 1995
Irene Mahugo Amaro studied scenography at the RESAD and the Masters in Research in Art and Creation at the UCM, and spent a year at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts (Krakow). She is currently a pre-doctoral researcher in training at the UCLM and part of the performing arts research group ARTEA.
From an experience situated in crip-queer discourse, she investigates the production of new imaginaries that subvert the functional norms of the body. Dissociation, prosthesis, contagion, technological acceleration, scar, politics of body control and alliances are some of the concepts that help to define her practical-theoretical research.
Her discourse is traversed by the search for a horizontal revolution, referencing the philosopher Adriana Cavarero, when she explores inclination as a relational model in the face of masculine verticality; and the subsequent transfeminist and anti-capacitist contributions that have been added to her affirmations, in order to think a subjectivity marked by vulnerability and difference. Her proposals are not exclusively of an exhibition nature, giving importance to the collaborative and the processual, in order to rethink strategies of artistic and performative resistance in a contemporary sick society. Through the word – performative writing and reading -, movement or the lack of it, and the audiovisual and photographic record, she constructs new questions and some answers to rethink the body itself and communal practices of existence.
From the beginning of the pre-doctoral process, she shares and activates the results of the research in different ways, in congresses and conferences, interspersing readings, writing and artistic practice; until considering them as a single mass in which to develop indistinctly. Some important samples are the one carried out in “Fugas e Interferencias: VII International Performance Art Conference” held at the Universidade de Vigo and CGAC, in the Encuentros de Sociología Ordinaria #11 at the MNCARS, the “Congreso Internacional DESNORTADAS. Territorios del género en la creación artística contemporánea” held at La Térmica in Málaga or with her performative reading entitled “Materia oscura” at the Sala Amadís in Madrid, as part of the project “El Poder: Live-Theater der spanischen Prostituierten” curated by the Desgarradura collective, among others.
