Gabriel Zúñiga
Gabriel Zúñiga is a Colombian artist working across dance, performance, writing, and pedagogy. Her practice—a sustained triple escape through movement, image, and text—sits at the intersections of body, memory, language, and identity, understanding movement as a form of embodied thought and affective resistance.
Since 2019, she has been developing works in dance and performance, with a research focus that articulates trans experience, Latin American territory, and the poetics of the body. In her work dance is a living archive and writing a score of the experience. Her work prioritizes the construction of a body that can name, reinvent, and share. Through this corporal methodology, her practice contributes to a critical cultural dialogue and the safeguarding of intangible, embodied heritage.
The body as a possibility, movement as a tool
What is told from, through and in the body.
My practice is a sustained escape. An investigation in and from the body to break free from the fictions of race, gender, progress and knowledge. Here, movement, image and words are tools to unlearn the impose gesture, reclaim the mestiza rhythm and mobilize the memories, voices and narratives that power seeks to erase.
Playing with identity, rhythm, dreams and disillusion; becoming every time less and less human.
My research is an exercise of bodily and epistemological marronage.
I mobilize the body as the primary territory of rebelliousness. Faced with the colonial gaze that seeks to classify, discipline, and extract, my work executes three escape lines:
Movement: disarticulate inherited gestures to inhabit an animal, porous corporeality that disobeys the codes of gender and race.
Image: construct visual counter-narratives that dismantle official archives and make visible the memories of the body-territory.
Text: play with the coherence and purpose of language, expanding the communicative units through movement.
I am grateful for my body and for my agency. I seek to dehumanize my experience in order to escape the system structured gaze. I embrace my animality, imagine possible futures, and play with my body and its meanings in motion.
