Fernanda Branco

Environment embodiment - towards poetic narratives

Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Academy of Theatre

Photo: Performance ebbs eludes encapsulates echoes. Still image by Sheila Leoneli.

This artistic research explores the concept of agency in the context of encounters between body and environment, proposing the body as an environment. Positioning itself in the performance field, the artistic works form a series, exploring performance in dialogue with films, poetry and installations.

The project draws from uncanny, poetic and embodied perspectives. A single action is practiced cyclically throughout the research: to walk backwards. The research inhabits spaces between genres, styles, media and disciplines, while braiding together facts, theory, speculative fiction, fable, documentary and poetry. Non-conventional documentation is explored focus on activating the imagination particularly in relation to the loss of the experiential when documenting live art works and embodied practices.

Fernanda Branco is a Brazilian performer, gardener and poet based in Norway, working in the performance field, crossing boundaries between theatre, dance, film, and installation while combining theory, facts, fiction, and poetry. Branco holds a Master of Fine Arts in Performance from Scenekunst Academy- Høgskolen i Østfold and is currently a Ph.D. artistic research fellow at Kunsthøgskole i Oslo. The research project explores concepts of agency in the context of encounters between body and environment, drawing from uncanny, poetic, embodied perspectives and relations with ecological crises.

 


Presentations

Artistic Research Autumn Forum 2023

 


This presentation embeds the various writing genres I work in my research and it will address how the project was affected by its conditionings in the beginning, having the consequences of starting to work with film-performances and using artistic residencies as a working strategy. I will present an ethical challenge I had while working in my last project, dealing with aesthetics and ecological crises. I will reflect upon the way I make notes connects with how I approach my research. And for my final assessment my focus is to work with the durational performance installation format, which includes part of the reflection on it, with the intention that the committee discovers the complementary aspect of my work with layering, through the fragmentary, concise and absent.