EMBODIED ARCHIVES // Nina Sandino (NI/AT), Sunanda Mesquita (IN/CH/AT), Daniela Hernández (MX/AT)

Fri 23.5.2025 // 19.30

Transdisciplinary work-in-progress showing // Bräuhausgasse 40, 1050 Wien // pay as you wish // drinks & food

Our project explores concepts of lineages, (family) archives through three distinct but interconnected approaches. While we maintain individual explorations – one as a transdisciplinary artist, two as performers – we emphasize collaboration, reflecting our belief that thriving creative communities are built on sustainable practices. Inspired by decolonial aesthetics and practices of care we challenge Eurocentric frameworks in artistic creation. This encourages us to explore alternative ways of knowing and expressing through art – methods that honor our lived experiences and cultural backgrounds.

A key focus of our work is understanding the body as a repository of knowledge. This aligns with decolonial methodologies that resist overly intellectual approaches, instead prioritizing embodied experiences as valid sources of insight. During our final presentation we will share our (movement) research in three distinct ways – through installations, performance elements and sharing food.

SONGS (working title) // Nina Sandino
Migration, Motherhood, and Culinary Heritage

This interdisciplinary performance delves into the intertwined themes of migration, motherhood, and cultural preservation. Drawing inspiration from the resilience of mangroves—trees that thrive at the intersection of salt and freshwater—my work explores how the women in my maternal lineage navigated and rooted themselves amidst changing landscapes. Through a blend of movement, storytelling, and a communal degustation of the traditional Caribbean dish “rondón”, this project seeks to foster spaces for shared experiences and reflection on the enduring strength of familial bonds and the cultural rituals that sustain identity across generations and geographies.

Credits:
Text, soundscape, costume and performance: Nina Sandino
Poems: Yolanda Elizabeth Rossman Tejada (my mother) and Ava Binta Giallo
Mask: Marisel Bongola
Plant arrangement on mask by Master florist Antonia García Moser
Rondón degustation by culinary consultant Tania Barberena
Special thanks: Martin Wax

TRACING BE-LONGING: Reimagining Archives // Sunanda Mesquita

“Tracing Be-longing: Reimagining Archives” investigates how archives function as forms of embodied knowledges within diasporan communities. Tracing, in the sense of “Nachspüren”, forms the basis of my visual and curatorial practice. It allows me to build proximity, recognize, capture, and reframe details while pursuing questions about belonging. I use Be-longing in the sense of being able to feel at home within oneself or within connections to places and people. It is a state that is temporary and fluid. Concepts of time, space and image as documentation tools are thus unmasked in their supposed linearity. The context in which the images were created – the protagonists and their history(ies) and utopias – is essential for the process of remembering, dreaming, feeling back and creating anew.

During our RESIDENCY@Im_flieger I engaged with BIPoC artists, researchers and performers to further explore archiving as forms of embodied knowledges. The installation “Tracing Be-longing: Reimagining Archives” presents snippets from these interactions and my investigations into personal archives with questions of identity, belonging and my commitment to foster sustainable connections to people, land, and discourses, grounded in practices of care.
At the heart of this investigation lies a commitment to transdisciplinary artistic practices, which serve as both methodological approach as well as mode of inquiry. Utilizing a diverse array of analog and digital mediums, including video, photography, drawing, sound recordings, animations, and collages, I dive into personal archives and oral histories to explore process-oriented archival strategies.

Credits:
Transmedial installation and Copyrights: Sunanda Mesquita

“LO QUE SE QUEDA” // Daniela Hernández
Identity, migration and maternal lineage

“Lo que se queda” is a multidisciplinary process that weaves together personal archives, embodied memory, and storytelling to explore themes of identity, migration, and maternal lineage. Rooted in the liminal space between belonging and becoming, this performance research reflects on memory not solely as something of the past, but as a living, shifting presence that continues to shape identities, relationships, and ways of being.
Drawing from the fragmentary nature of inherited stories – what stays with us, in our bodies, in the spaces we leave behind, or in what persists despite absence – I trace the intergenerational echoes of my maternal line. Through movement, voice, and material remnants, I seek to understand how these narratives cross us differently, yet bind us in shared affect.
“Lo que se queda” becomes a method of tracing to locate the subtle yet persistent ways memory operates in the now. By working with what remains, I investigate how diasporic experience inscribes itself within the everyday, turning personal memory into a site of inquiry, resistance, and reimagination.

Credits:
Text, costume and performance: Daniela Hernández
Soundscape: Adriano Vinca
Poems: Daniela Hernandez Flores, Adriana Leticia Flores Juarez, Susana Juarez Tecpanecatl.