Marcos Simoes

Biography

Marcos Simoes is a choreographic artist and artist living in Brussels. Since 2002 he has been creating performances on his own or in collaboration with other artists.

If the body is his working material, he uses different media in his performances: movement, sound, video, drawing, image and textiles to create situations and contexts in which he explores other forms of relating and communicating: through emotions, interjections, gestures and extra sensory perception practices.

How do we allow other forces to enter the work? How do we involve process, intuition and not knowing in the work? And how do we make room for other logics of making and ways of understanding?

His work questions modes of relationality, collaboration, production and meaning creation.

In residentie More or less human

More or Less Human starts both from the idea of a study on the aesthetics of fear, as much as the idea of art as a community of voices that resonate through space and time. Fear is an ancestral force, a powerful energy that fuels and invades our imagination in the form of visions. It can take control over our minds and bodies, and has the ability to shape the way we look and act upon things, upon the world we live in.In our current context, fear as invaded our reality, imaginations and our bodies more then ever .

The aesthetics of fear

Fear and terror has always been part of our history of representations, of mythologies, rumors and story tellings, inhabited by strange creatures, monsters, devils, forces of nature spreading the chaos and death, making allusion to an appocalyptical state of the world, an experience of hell.Fear is intimately connected to the unknown, to what we cannot control, to forces bigger than us. It confronts us with something other, something wild, visceral and mysterious.Fear induces resistances, forms of activism and generates subversive logics. An obscure force that has the ability to transform, that is directly connected to forms of alterity and otherness in ourselves. It relates us to our instincts, to the animal and to what is unnatural in us.

I’m interested in fear as a shape maker, a vector of movement, a survival mechanism, a response to danger, an alert tool , an implosion or explosion – like a cat that crosses a dog – a reaction.How does fear shape things ? What kind of objects does it produce? What kind of dances came out through fear? How many types of bodies – individual and social – has it generated? Social choreographies, gestures, acts?

I will gather images, text, videos, and other forms of knowledge with the idea of making an intuitive study of the aesthetics and iconography of fear – a strategy to grasp fear as a creative force.This study will help me during the process of creation to shape movements, gestures, actions, other materialities and mediums. These choreographic and visual materials will constitute the elements that compose the body and structure of More or Less Human – they will be my objects of fear.

These objects I see them as tools. Tools to act upon, to move and to shape things.
Tools to survive
Tools to hunt
Tools to activate, to react
Tools for subversion, to play
Tools to hunt, to relate
Tools to become other, to become animal, plant, color.
Tools of a warrior, an activist tool.A handcrafted tool, sharp and deformed
A non sense, a withcraft, a spiritual tool
A tool to speak, to raise voices.
A tool to evoke presences.

Art – a community of things – a form of activism

I think art as a collaboration tool for artists. A transmission system of disparate information, a web of interconnections and relationships that circulates through time and space, and brings artists together in a strange manner.

A something is in the air activates and reactivates art and artists – It brings presences from the sphere of the death – a network of artworks and other knowledges that collaborates, conjugates through distance in order to reflect our time. I see it as a form of activism. I want to activate voices of other artists in my work – as a community of artists, of death and living artists that tunes, echoes and comes together.

Polyphonic voice

In More or Less Human I want to articulate the choreography, sound, video and visual objects in order to exist in a state of togetherness within a community that tunes with Fear.More or Less Human will be an art choir to digest fear by raising a polyphonic voice that reflects and acts upon the world.

project details