Amanda Piña

Imagine your bones made of corals. 

Imagine your limbs as dancing filaments whose movements merge with water currents and intertwine with other beings. They brush against different textures, meet different bodies and merge in a perpetual exchange. Each particle within us constitutes a fragment of the history of something or someone that ceased to be—at least as a whole—but continues a new form of existence in different bodies in constant change. Our bones made of ancestral bodies, to bloom and live in the fullness of existence. 

Amanda Piña’s To Bloom () Florecimiento stems from the story of a medusa (or jellyfish) as a primordial organism, a metaphor and symbol of transformation: flowing, changing, eroding, rising. Cnidarians—anemones, medusas and corals—are transformative creatures that evolve throughout their lifetimes, shifting from being anchored to rocks as anemones to drifting with ocean currents as medusas. Their tentacular metamorphoses exemplify resilience.  

These beings, originating 580 million years ago and persisting in today’s heavily impacted oceans, provide a source of calcium found in sedimentary rocks, nourishing human bones through their fossilised presence. When water from these rocks reaches valleys via rivers in mountainous regions, the calcium content becomes part of the water supply used for human consumption in cities, contributing to the nourishment of our bones. This notion invites us to envision our bones as corals, reminding us that we are fundamentally interconnected with the ocean as integral elements of its composition. 

To Bloom () Florecimiento seeks to honour the ocean, its inhabitants and their connection to the mountains through river flows, as ancestral entities within us. Through ritual performance, choreography and embodiment, Amanda evokes the essence of the ocean within the riverbed, creating a ceremonial space to reverence water in its expansive transformation journey. 

This glorious medusa finds its place in the Traisen, below the Westbahn Bridge, swaying under the highpitched chants of the bats that inhabit the area. The medusa extends filaments woven by the artisans of Izamal, Yucatán and Zacualpan de Amilpas, Morelos, Mexico, into the waters of the Traisen. At its core, this flowing being hosts a flower offering as a way of asking permission and thanking the river for its collaboration. 

To Bloom () Florecimiento is a performative sculpture activated by a series of walks in which the performers become water spirits and marine creatures. Through dance and sound, we meet oceanic beings that bloom in the most diverse ways, embodying beings from the sea, different creatures with different teachings, and many worlds, as there are worlds of being and experience. 

Amanda Piña (1987, Santiago de Chile) is a Chilean-Mexican-Austrian based artist living between Vienna and Mexico City. Of mixed ancestry, Amanda has Spanish, Mapuche and Lebanese (Syrian-Palestinian) roots. Piña is a pluri-faceted artist working through choreographic and dance research, creating and curating artistic and educational frameworks, and writing and editing publications around what she refers to as ‘Endangered Human Movement Movements’. Her work is presented within performing and visual arts contexts and has been showed in various theatres, festivals galleries and museums around the world, such as Kunsthalle Wien, Transit SK, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain Paris, Festival Paris d’Automne, MUMOK Museum Moderne Kunst Wien, deSingel Arts Campus Antwerp, Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, Museo Universitario del Chopo, México and GAM Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile among others.