Statement

My research focuses on the body, corporealities, and the bodily realities produced and shared in cultural and social spaces. I work with embodied memory and examine the construction of subjectivity, femininity, gender roles, and the experience of violence from a stance of womanly and menopausal subjectivation.

My practice brings together contemporary dance, action art, audiovisual media, and writing. I study the creation of language through the assemblage of different bodily technologies, as well as experimental and multimodal ethnography. I understand indisciplines as a way of working: I link creation, research, and education. From "Desplazamientos" (Displacements), a choreographic research project that pushes at the crossings between dance and anthropology, I developed a methodology that I share in workshops.

I work through collaboration. I act in streets, squares, and parks, where unexpected human contact draws me in, and also in galleries, performance venues, theaters, and museums.

I am from Quito. South America is my place of enunciation and my political stance, and from there I understand my practice as an ethical, poetic, and political exercise.

Valeria Andrade Proaño
I am a five-legged animala (female animal) of modern training (with one leg in dance, another in performance, another in yoga, another in anthropology, and another in teaching) who never learned to build a career straight, only wide; in my indiscipline, I go on contaminating artistic and academic technologies in an embodied way. With a romantic spirit forged on Shelley, Verne, Salgari, and Stevenson, I grew up convinced that utopia is best pursued in collaboration, with the juarasjuasjuas (guffaws) as its main engine, though I also catch fire and rage at any abuse born of an asymmetry of power. Quiteña by origin and by ways of proceeding, I stand politically in the South, from a feminism in constant subjectivation that gets much more heated with menopause.

I hold a Bachelor's degree in Education Sciences with a specialization in Linguistics and Literature (PUCE) and a Master's in Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Documentary (FLACSO-Ecuador). I currently teach, by vocation.

SUJETA A CAMBIOS

Sujeta a cambios (Subject to Change) is not just a name but the declaration of principles of an embodied thought in constant transit. This practice works as a critical device of self-knowledge and action that articulates three fundamental dimensions: the complexity of being a woman, the body as a way of knowing the world, and artistic practice as a research methodology. Through this articulation, I turn myself into a creative laboratory and a site of experimentation to set questions about the world in motion.

It implies taking nothing for granted, undertaking a deep journey that crosses what seems habitual and solid; it means taking distance, separating, detaching and letting go of what holds me. It is not an attitude but a lived stance, a leap toward freedom, in whose vertigo the possibility of transformation opens: thought becomes movement and the word embodies the courage to challenge social common sense. From this perspective, I weave the personal with the collective, the intimate with the political, from the transformative power of the body, of action and of dance.

My embodied thought lives and explores the passage of time as a zone of conflict and political power. In this context, new states are an adventure, subjective transformations a constant learning, and I discover the beauty of finitude in the miraculous gift of life. From this understanding, I want to build a gaze that reveals the expressive possibilities of menopause and to experience this metamorphosis toward unexplored territories, where movement and presence become a living archive of personal memories and collective traces.