Clara Amaral

Clara Amaral’s current research explores variations of the act of reading. She asks: In what other way can I read out loud? How can I make that reading out loud into a performative gesture? The act of reading silently (The distance between your voice and my voice is what your eyes can read but I can’t say) and the (im)materiality of a book (Do you remember that time we were together and danced this or that dance?) have been research topics in Clara Amaral’s practice. In her current work, she is interested not only in exploring the page as a place that can host language but also understanding the page as a place where movement can be annotation. How can that notation feed into the live performance of the reading\dance? At Espaço Alkantara, Clara Amaral will be working on the textual score for the piece and exploring graphic design possibilities with Karoline Swiezynski (graphic designer).

Artist Bio

Clara Amaral graduated from SNDO in 2013 and is currently in the second year of her MA studies at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI).Her work Do you remember that time we were together and danced this or that dance? premiered at Julidans in 2017 and was presented at Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam; Something Raw Festival at Frascati, Amsterdam; Circular in Vila do Conde; and Festival Temps d’Images in Lisbon. It will be translated to Portuguese on the occasion of its presentation at Teatro Municipal do Porto in November 2019. In 2018 her publication The distance between your voice and my voice is what your eyes can read but I can’t say was part of Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life, a group show curated by Ruth Noack, with iterations in Athens, Prague and in Stuttgart (November 2019). Her most recent work, In our eyes, a cascade, premiered in November 2018 at Bâtard Festival in Brussels and was also presented at Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam. This work will be presented at far° festival in Switzerland in August 2019. Her texts have been published in Theaterkrant, Theatermaker and in Contemporary Cruising. As a performer she collaborated with Ivana Muller, Oneka von Schrader and Becket Mingwen.

Karoline Swiezynski (1982, Wadern, Germany) is a graphic designer based in Amsterdam, who works mostly on paper-based media like books, brochures, bulletins and other translated communication. She mines formal and non-formal links from project/site-specific structures. Her graphic design focus is on art-related content such as in writings, photography, activism, and process material—both academic and nonacademic. Swiezynski graduated in 2011 from the Graphic Design department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Since then, she has joined a wide range of culturally involved initiatives within the Netherlands. In 2018-19 she participated in a one-year residency program at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht