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aïda 

colmenero

dïaz

aïda

colmenero

dïaz

Aïda Colmenero Dïaz is an artist, actress, choreographer, dancer, filmmaker and a Performing arts curator born in Madrid of Galician descent. Aïda is a leading artist in Spain thanks to her avant-garde career, which has led her to explore unusual regions of the world and to embark on unique creative processes, crossing borders and providing a complex and alternative reflection on identity and cultural heritage with a solid gender perspective. Through her work, marked by her multidisciplinary creative capacity and her innovative nature in our context, she aims to connect minds, build geographical and cultural bridges, and recover historical memory, in order to build a future in which prevails the recognition of the different cultures of the world, as well as intercultural contact as an engine for art creation. In the last decade, Aïda has worked to boost the African performing arts sector, carrying out extensive mentoring work with new generations of emerging talent and their promotion in both Africa and Europe. Founder and director of She Poems project, with which she has so far created 20 short dance films, the choreographic pieces '2nd November, the fear remover' (Senegal, 2014), 'Lifetime Dust VII' (Tanzania, 2016), 'Qué importa el abismo' (Togo, 2016), 'Tell him' (Kenya, 2016), 'El Canto' (Niger, 2016), 'Templo' (Togo, 2018) and 'Khoes Conquers' (Namibia, 2019), and photographic series together with female leading figures in performing arts from over a dozen African countries, proposing a decolonising paradigm on the African continent and its contemporary art-making, and presented on stages such as Mercat de les Flors, Teatros del Canal, Auditorio de Tenerife, Potsdammer Tanztage or the San Francisco Dance Film Festival. Her works offer universal messages that refer to the essentiality of human beings and their connection with visible and invisible nature, and are based on collective creative processes in which Aïda develops the creative potential of each artist in her company, drawing from imagination, energy and instinct. Among her latest stage works as a performer are 'Aka Nativa', premiered at the Jomba! festival in Durban, South Africa, and her recent piece 'Conxurando o invisible', produced by UNESCO Spain and premiered at Escena Patrimonio 2020 festival. Supported and produced by Spanish Embassies and international bodies such as Casa Africa, and awarded a grant twice by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and by the Spanish Agency for Cooperation and Development (AECID), she is invited to participate in the ACERCA programme as a trainer specialising in creation and choreography in Ecuador and Niger. In 2019 she receives a commission from the Colombian Ministry of Culture to create a new piece for the ballet of Cali's Contemporary Dance Company, premiering the piece 'Yala' with 16 performers. In 2020 she publishes alongside Nora Chipaumire the art book 'Bhuku. Cartography of the animist body and radical black African presences. Process and practice of the animist technology' and for the last four years she has been collaborating intensively with the company's research group in the development of the body technique and philosophy 'Nhaka'. Aïda combines her profession as an art creator with her pedagogical activity, giving workshops and master classes in numerous centres and universities in Europe, Latin America and Africa, such as the Winneba in Ghana, the College of the Arts in Namibia, the Abdou Moumouni in Niamey in Niger, the Sport in Copenhagen and the Pontificia Católica de Quito in Ecuador. She is the only Spanish-speaking artist in the world certified to transmit the Acogny technique by her own creator, Germaine Acogny, and is a professor at the École des Sables in Senegal, the first professional dance centre on the African continent. In 2016 she founded platform Africa Moment, through which she promotes the arts and pedagogies of leading artists from the African continent and its diaspora in Spain, and provides artistic consultancy for festivals, performance spaces and cultural institutions. With her artistic and pedagogical direction, she has curated 4 editions of the International Meeting of Performing Arts Africa Moment in Barcelona, in which she has programmed more than 60 new artists from around 30 countries, achieving multidisciplinary programmes, with numerous national premieres awarded by the critique, a strong female presence and a clear call for reflection in community. 

video javier sánchez salcedo
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