LICHEN Dances

A project initiated by Dinis Machado as an experiment for a possible Summer Company for Filipstad.

LICHEN  Dances is the sharing of the process of a series of 21 encounters  throughout 6 months. These encounters with a group of teenagers and  young adults of Filipstad were Initiated by Dinis Machado, accompanied  by musician Rayo and Photographer Lo River Lööf and made possible in  partnership with Filipstads Kommun. During these meetings, we researched  possibilities of what can be a future Filipstads Summer company in this  context - an industrial city within a vast forest, and definitely a  space of encounter and negotiation of migratory trajectories of Machado  and so many others towards living and dancing together. 

Dinis  Machado has since 2019 shared their base between Stockholm and  Filipstad. Throughout the Pandemic, Filipstad's forest became a safe  space for research of their individual work exploring relations between  ecology - as the artificial development of the sustainability of nature -  and their transition - as the sustainable consubstantiation of their  trans body into the future. 

LICHEN  Dances, as a gesture into collectivity, is the launching project of a  homonymous artistic structure - LICHEN Collaborations - that has now its  beginning. A next step, where Machado aims to create a platform for  exchange research and production with other artists in the city as well  as provide first experiences with art to local young adults. 

A lichen is a  symbiotic organism composed of the collaboration of an algae with a  fungi in a mutualistic relationship. The algae share its photosynthesis  with the fungus, and the fungus shelters the algae. Inspired by the  survival strategy of lichens, these dances are a group of small  symbiotic experiments between different people, activities, patrimonies,  ideas of what dance can be, strategies of enacting them, translations  and re-approximations. They weave through practice a ritualistic space  of common dancing and understanding, both uncanny for all and hopefully  progressively familiar. Departing from dancing together while sharing  favourite music and favourite places, we translated movement into words,  words into movement, and back again. We sang movements and moved to  sang songs, slowly sedimenting a mysterious movement maze.