Mediation and Context.
mediation
Al Relente
"Al Relente" is a dance and mediation workshop for dozens of non-professional women, culminating in a collective performance in public space. The project uses choreographed everyday gestures to make the female body visible and generate new ways of inhabiting the urban environment. Through this action, the piece questions the objectification, discrimination and homogenisation of women in today's society.
‘Al Relente’ is a dance workshop and mediation project aimed at non-professional women with untrained bodies, resulting in a collective performance in public space.
The project is aimed at a group of between 30 and 40 women who, through a choreographic score of everyday gestures, make the female body visible and create a space to imagine and build new relationships with the body, with movement and with public space.
‘Al Relente’ questions the objectification and discrimination of the female body, in a society that demands women who are homogeneous, unreal and apolitical.
mediation
Cartografías Culturales
Another line of research is Cartografías Culturales, a platform that brings together contemporary creation, territory, training and mediation, with particular attention to local and rural contexts.
Cartografías Culturales (www.cartografiasculturales.org) is a regional, collaborative and interdisciplinary platform led by Mari Paula, bringing together contemporary creation, territory, training and mediation, with particular attention to local and rural contexts. The project provides information and visibility tools to improve rural cultural offerings, alongside artistic and training activities.
Its initial scope covers the municipalities of Cantabria identified as being at serious risk of depopulation by the Regional Strategy for the Demographic Challenge. The proposal is structured around two complementary strands of work: a mapping of local cultural resources and a programme of contemporary artistic experiences.
The mapping of cultural resources makes visible and connects resources in rural areas with cultural institutions at local, national and international level. It is organised into three fields: local cultural agents, whether public or private; disused public spaces or facilities suitable for cultural use; and expressions of each municipality’s intangible cultural heritage, classified according to Unesco’s thematic categories.
The artistic experiences are a pilot programme of contemporary culture developed in rural areas of Cantabria. Distributed by district and carried out by local professionals in the sector, it includes performances, workshops and screenings across disciplines such as contemporary dance, experimental cinema, and electronic music and visuals.
The project is carried out in collaboration with Torreón Arquitectura (www.torreonterritorio.es), a studio founded in 2013 by José Daniel Campos and Adrián Torices, with offices in Cantabria and Andalusia, specialising in bioclimatic architecture, sustainable territorial management and critical strategies for rethinking the territorial model.
mediación
Contexto Académico
Mari Paula extends her context-building practice into the academic sphere, with training, research and creation activities in dialogue with universities in Spain and Latin America — the Universidad de Cantabria, UNAM and UNESPAR, among others. This line of work includes projects such as Cuerpografías and Máquina Hamlet, as well as an ongoing collaboration with researcher Alicia Piñar Díaz, which gave rise to the publication "Mari Paula, una coreógrafa antropófaga."
Context-building also extends into the academic and university sphere, where Mari Paula carries out training, research and creation activities in dialogue with various institutions. Her track record includes collaborations with the Universidad de Cantabria, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the Faculdade de Artes do Paraná / Universidade Estadual do Paraná (UNESPAR), and other university and artistic training contexts in Spain and Latin America.
Among these experiences are the project Cuerpografías, developed at the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico as part of the expanded programme of Festival Cultura UNAM, and Máquina Hamlet (eldiariomontanes.es/culturas), with the Theatre Workshop of the Universidad de Cantabria, where she took on movement direction and choreography.
This line of work is also carried out in collaboration with researcher Alicia Piñar Díaz, establishing an ongoing dialogue between artistic practice and academic research. This relationship has produced the publication “Mari Paula, una coreógrafa antropófaga” (revistaseug.ugr.es), published in Quiroga. Revista de Patrimonio Iberoamericano, as well as the presence of her work in international academic contexts linked to the University of Delaware and Johns Hopkins University.
Mediation is thus understood not as an activity complementary to creation, but as a practice of research and context-production, capable of connecting contemporary dance with communities, territories, cultural institutions and spaces of thought.