Double Sided reinvents performance through minimal gestures, repeated variation, and sculptural presence * 2023 * Anto Lloveras - Mateo Feijoo

Double Sided by Anto Lloveras and Mateo Feijoo stands as a potent example of conceptual dance operating at the intersection of performance, sculpture, and quotidian gesture. The piece disarms theatrical convention by stripping away narrative, drama, and decor, privileging instead micro-variation, repetition, and minimalist composition. With a two-channel structure and a live-action sensibility, it aligns itself with the lineage of 1960s North American minimalism, the existential absurdity of Beckett, and the performative installations of Erwin Wurm. The performers, neither actors nor dancers in the classical sense, inhabit the space with a kind of radical normalcy, enacting gestures that feel both banal and meticulously structured. 

Double Sided * Mirrored bodies and the ethics of resonance

Double Sided, a durational performance and film series co-authored by Anto Lloveras and Mateo Feijoo, unfolds as a minimalist apparatus of delay, drift, and reflective tension, in which two performers inhabit a split stage and non-synchronized dual-screen configuration, producing a mirrored yet non-identical field where bodies oscillate between echo and divergence, refusing symmetrical closure; gestures recur with temporal displacement, creating a space that is haunted by rhythm rather than defined by structure, drawing from Beckett’s dramaturgical silence, 1960s conceptual minimalism, and Paul B. Preciado’s somatic epistemologies to expose presence as choreographic architecture rather than expressive overflow; repetition becomes the mechanism through which micro-shifts emerge, and the stage—framed by modular scenographies and neutral costumes—becomes a pedagogical field where perception is tested and subtle variance is the content itself; here, duality is not dichotomy but a method: each gesture remembers its double without replicating it, each silence holds the ghost of its twin, and what seems minimal is revealed as densely charged with affective latency and structural intelligence; Double Sided offers no narrative resolution, only a syntax of attention, in which repetition is never the same, and dual embodiment becomes a tool for learning, not mirroring—a shared yet unsynchronised vocabulary where each deviation becomes an act of critical presence.

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.