Catarina Vieira

I was born in 1983, Aveiro, Portugal. I’m a theatre maker based in Lisbon whose work articulates different artistic fields, such as Theatre, Performance, Installation and Video. I graduated as a theatre maker at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon). Between 2007 and 2015, I have worked mostly in partnership with the theatre maker Solange Freitas.

In 2016, I started studying at DAS Theatre (Amsterdam), with the objective of finding alternatives to a mode of artistic production that has to be concentrated in time, efficient, lacking space for deep experimentation. During the Master, I started developing my work as a practice of encountering people. With this practice, I could start engaging with the audience in a more horizontal way, where the participant has to learn the rules of its own autonomy and participation, as I propose an encounter that operates with undefined and imperceptible functions.

Another line of this research unfolded into a concrete investigation on the format of workshop and its potential of becoming a place to practice already the conditions that we need for a better future. I believe that these conditions can be tested, crafted with our bodies, with the knowledge that we carry in our flesh and that we can share this knowledge by being present and being together.

After finishing this Master, I moved back to Lisbon, where I initiated recently an open studio (Matéria) to share practices based on thinking together as an embodied process. It’s an artistic research on performative practices as fields of experimentation into the complex existential dimensions of life. Performative practices as unfoldings of thinking, criticising, and altering our relationship to ourselves, the others, the ecologies we exist within, and life itself. What happens when the goal of an artistic process is not the final product but the collective act of participation itself as a poetic gesture? What happens to art when it gives up showing and gives in to doing?