Academic Studies Session: 8
Radical Intimacies
30 January 2025 | 18:00–21:00
Online Zoom | English
Aura Arreola | Speaker
The eighth session of the Academic Studies series featured a hybrid presentation by Aura Arreola under the title “Radical Intimacies.” Emerging from a speculative laboratory designed to imagine alternative forms of intimacy beyond heteropatriarchal norms, the presentation explored performance-based methodologies through practices such as Butoh dance and contact, sound and silence improvisations, embodied writing, and experiential exercises.
Inviting participants into the transformative potential of both affecting and being affected, the session cultivated questions around post-human and post-patriarchal understandings of intimacy. Drawing on notions of response-ability inspired by Donna Haraway and an activism of the erotic resonating with Audre Lorde, the presentation examined intimacy as an embodied, interconnected, and political mode of relation.
Aura Arreola is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and choreographer specializing in intermedia collaborations, sound performance, and Butoh dance. Her work explores intimacy, vulnerability, and affect, creating safer spaces for alternative relationships with the more-than-human world. Working across Mexico and Japan, Arreola has developed a transdisciplinary practice through workshops, lectures, and ecosomatic encounters, collaborating with artists across Japan, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the United States, and Mexico. She has worked with renowned Butoh masters including Tadashi Endo, Natsu Nakajima, Taketeru Kudo, and Yukio Suzuki. Arreola completed her MFA at National Autonomous University of Mexico with the project Radical Intimacies, an artistic laboratory later presented in Mexico, at Performance Studies International #29 in London, and at Studio 303 in Montreal.
