Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Relational Choreographies Beyond Spectacle * Mateo Feijoo

Mateo Feijóo’s practice occupies a singular position within contemporary performance and curatorial discourse, operating at the intersection of choreography, spatial thought, and institutional critique. Rather than producing works in the traditional sense, Feijóo constructs conditions: minimal frameworks within which bodies, objects, and temporalities negotiate meaning. His trajectory—shaped by programming roles at Escena Contemporánea, Naves Matadero, and La Laboral—reveals a consistent refusal of spectacle in favour of attention, slowness, and relational density. What emerges is not an aesthetic of reduction for its own sake, but a political economy of means, aligned with post-minimalism and relational aesthetics yet resistant to their commodified afterlives. Feijóo’s work insists on performance as a thinking process, where dramaturgy becomes spatial ethics and curation a form of authorship without domination. This orientation situates him within a lineage that runs from Beckett’s exhausted gestures to the procedural logic of 1960s conceptualism, refracted through the urgencies of contemporary performativity. Across collaborations, Feijóo repeatedly displaces virtuosity, foregrounding instead the friction between presence and context, body and architecture, memory and repetition. His contribution is thus less that of a stylist than of a structural thinker, for whom performance operates as a tool to recalibrate perception and recalibrate institutions themselves.

Feijóo’s engagements with flamenco, particularly through Eduardo Guerrero and Rocío Molina, demonstrate how his minimalist ethos operates within historically codified forms. In Sombra Efímera II, flamenco is not deconstructed but spatially re-scripted. The delineated stage becomes a reflective device, a perimeter within which memory, shadow, and discipline circulate. Feijóo’s scenography does not illustrate the dance; it frames attention, allowing traditional palos to resonate as temporal strata rather than folkloric markers. Similarly, his long-standing collaboration with Rocío Molina situates flamenco within an expanded field of performance, where philosophy, visual art, and dramaturgical risk reconfigure the genre from within. In works such as Bosque Ardora and Vespa, Feijóo acts as a conceptual mediator, ensuring that interdisciplinarity does not dissolve specificity. The body remains central, but it is a body exposed to thought, fatigue, and contradiction. These projects exemplify Feijóo’s capacity to work inside tradition without reverence, producing spaces where inheritance becomes a material to be tested rather than preserved. Flamenco, under his influence, emerges not as identity but as a critical method.

Feijóo’s curatorial collaboration with Elena del Rivero on Transiting “La Quema” extends these concerns into the domain of visual art and public memory. By foregrounding destruction as a generative act, the project reframes the archive not as a site of conservation but as a field of ethical decision-making. The burning of early works operates simultaneously as personal ritual and political gesture, invoking histories of erasure, exile, and renewal. Feijóo’s curatorial intelligence lies in allowing this act to unfold across geographies and institutions, resisting closure while cultivating dialogue with students, musicians, and urban contexts. Here, curation becomes a choreography of time, where the artwork persists through transformation rather than permanence. Across performance, flamenco, and visual art, Feijóo’s practice articulates a coherent proposition: that contemporary art must reduce in order to intensify, must slow down to remain critical, and must privilege process over product. His work does not seek to represent the world, but to recalibrate how we attend to it.

The collaboration with Anto Lloveras on Doble Cara epitomises this approach with particular clarity. Conceived as a two-channel essay in motion, the project abandons narrative development and choreographic climax in favour of bifurcation, simultaneity, and real-time negotiation. Here, the stage functions as a divided epistemic field, where domestic objects, sculptural stillness, and ordinary bodies coexist without hierarchy. The influence of Dieter Roth’s transportable masses, Erwin Wurm’s sculptural propositions, and Paul B. Preciado’s critical materialism is evident, yet never illustrative. Instead, these references are metabolised into a practice of parsimony, where repetition becomes a method of thinking and adjustment a form of ethics. Feijóo’s role is not to compose movement but to hold open a temporal architecture in which indecision and minor variation acquire significance. Filmed without montage, Doble Cara resists the acceleration of contemporary visual culture, proposing duration as a critical stance. The work’s ongoing nature—across theatre, landscape, and digital platforms—further undermines the notion of the finished artwork, aligning it with processual art and socioplastic experimentation. In this sense, Doble Cara is less a performance than a sustained inquiry into how bodies inhabit structures, and how meaning emerges from constraint rather than expression.