María Jerez

The project put forward by María Jerez forms part of a wide-ranging investigation that she intends carrying out in several stages during 2021 and 2022.

For this first part, the artist will develop Passer Domesticus: midway between a performance art piece and a film-essay. Passer Domesticus takes its title from the scientific name for the common house sparrow, the most familiar and frequently encountered bird in many urban areas. Based on the idea that no presence is neutral and understanding that birds are also our contemporaries with whom we share territories, events and history; Maria Jerez will study the sophisticated structures that birds develop - primarily their songs, flights, choreographies, nests and installations - the intention being to generate an event involving human and non-human artistic collaboration.

Maria Jerez

Her work lies “between” choreography, film and the visual arts. Above and beyond her interest in theatrical and cinematographic conventions that was evident in her first pieces, and the spectator's implicit understanding of them; in her latest works she seeks to question this relationship by opening up spaces of potentiality through encounters with that which we find strange and alien. Her most recent work emphasises the performativity of the encounter as a space of transformation. In this process of transformation, the “other” resides within oneself, establishing blurred borders between the known and the unknown, the object and the subject, the animate and the inanimate. Her work endeavours to escape from logocentric and anthropocentric logics, where human knowledge itself becomes something vulnerable in the face of other enigmatic and complex ecosystems..