« El Laboratorio » -a Franco-Chilian-Mexican exploration in connection with the creation of Migrating Voices.
Developed by La Constellation Gigacircus within WALC (Walking Arts & Local Communities), Migrating Voices is an art project in progress that explores exile, migration, and remote human presence.
« Exploring how we maintain emotional ties with our loved ones through smartphones and video communication tools, we, as a group of migrating artists based in Europe, Chile and Mexico, seek an artistic grammar capable of dissolving borders, transforming space, and creating the sensation of being together at a distance. »
Migrating Voices, an upcoming installation and performance, pursues a living artistic language blending digital technology and human experience to reinvent relationship beyond borders.
For the past two months, Sylvie Marchand & Lionel Camburet (F), Fred Adam (SP), Claudia Urrutia (CL) and Gustavo Alvarez (MEX), have been challenging the conventional video-conferencing formats that fragment bodies and reduce presence to faces in rectangles.
Today, during a thirty-minute experimental *Laboratorio*, these artists will experiment with a live performance using rudimentary audiovisual tools and raw materials, far from the giants of the Internet. They will be joined by guests, French-Tunisian walking artist Ridha Dhib in Paris, and WLC’s Annemarie Lopez in London.
This intercultural artistic dialogue enriches the exploration, within the project, of the themes of displacement, resilience and remote presence.
Sylvie Marchand, ethnologist and filmmaker, has been creating several artistic projects with the Raramuri people of the Sierra Tarahumara. These include Continent Rouge and Cantar o Morir .
She invited performance artist Gustavo Alvarez to join the project for his performance work with this powerful indigenous group.
Living Digital Art
Blending performance, low-tech audiovisual tools, and non-digital materials, Migrating Voices develops a nomadic, adaptable aesthetic inspired by Arte Povera, deliberately avoiding high-tech solutions. This approach allows the project to exist in public spaces and diverse contexts, including refugee camps.
Gigacircus artists hybridize digital and physical practices to invent a new artistic grammar—one that dissolves borders, transforms space, and creates the sensation of being together at a distance.
Migrating Voices ultimately pursues a living artistic language, intertwining digital technology and human experience to reimagine connection beyond borders.
Tarahumara Cultural Roots
To conduct this research, Sylvie Marchand invited the performer Gustavo Alvarez, who opened her the doors to the Raramuri culture of the Sierra Tarahumara in 2008 !
In the Migrating Voices Project, Gustavo acts as a catalyst to stimulate Gigacircus dialogues and experiments. The Rarámuri culture of the Sierra Tarahumara is known for its ritual practices of walking and movement—an influence famously explored by Antonin Artaud. This cultural dialogue enriches the project’s exploration of displacement, endurance, and communal presence.
Within the hour long event, there will be a 30 minute report on the process, content and schedule of WALC course of Walking Arts by Geert Vermeire and Fred Adam.
This free walking arts course, between Saturday 7 March and Saturday 27 June, structured around 13 online sessions, four workshops, and a continuous, process-based trajectory is conceived as a pilot, designed to be engaging for both students and artists. While it includes certain formal requirements, it remains explicitly experimental and grounded in horizontal, experiential learning.
Conceptually, the course positions walking arts as a practice that emerged from—and continues to draw inspiration from—the pre-digital, pre-networked 20th century, while being deeply rooted in the hybrid realities of the global 21st century. It responds to ecological and refugee crises, and emphasises the future-making potential of walking as both an artistic and thinking practice, including its healing, connective, and community-binding qualities.
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The co-funded EU Walking Arts and Local Communities (WALC) project offers an opportunity for public scrutiny of the project, by running bi-monthly free “Confluence events”, in which project partners come together to present how the aspect of the project for which they are responsible is progressing.
Hosts
Supported by
Locative Media Supercluster
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Walking Arts & Local Communities (WALC) is an artistic cooperation project, co-funded by the European Union, Creative Europe, starting in January 2024 for four years. With seven partners from five countries, WALC establishes an International Center for Artistic Research and Practice of Walking Arts, in Prespa, Greece, at the border with Albania and North Macedonia, backed up by an online counterpart in the format of a digital platform for walking arts.
WALC builds on the previous work of hundreds of artists and researchers already practicing Walking Arts as a collaborative medium, and having met at the significant previous walking arts events and encounters in Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and during online activities at walk · listen · create.
We acknowledge the support of the EU Creative Europe Cooperation grant program in the framework of the European project WALC (Walking Arts and Local Community).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
| Raramuri culture of the Sierra Tarahumara | ||
| Raramuri culture of the Sierra Tarahumara 2 |
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