Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Write & Create program / NOVEMBER 2022
Isa Fontbona
Spain
isafontbona.com
About
Visual artist, researcher (Ph.D. candidate in the department
of Art History at the University of Girona, Spain), and natural
bodybuilder competitor.
Using art, mainly through performance, I explore the
malleability of my body offered by bodybuilding. It leads me,
in some cases, to experiment and challenge the limits and
endurance of my body. Effort, resistance, and vulnerability
are concepts that I like to explore through my pieces. I tend
to ask about my own identity in relation to my flesh through
uncomfortable positions and an honest gaze. Putting myself
in a vulnerable position, I like to involve with the audience,
give voice to them, letting them to weaving the meaning of
the piece with freedom.
I like to explore terrains that make me tremble and take me
out of my comfort zone, which has led me to break with the
structuring and rigidity provided by the bodybuilding sphere
entering into the sphere of contemporary dance, and physical
theater where expression and fluidity beat.
Kotelo – inner dialogue
My experience at Arteles has allowed me the possibility
to create a break and put distance at a frantic pace, with
a wheel that has no brakes, which often doesn’t even leave
you time to breathe.
Arteles has been a reset for me.
My identity is always located in the “doing,” in physicality, in
effort, in wear and tear. This pattern made me think that the
project I wanted to carry out at Arteles was to explore what
happened to my identity, what type of dialogue took place
when I am at the opposite pole of this corrosive physicality.
How do I think myself from the “not doing”? What thoughts
come to my mind? What dialogue do I establish with myself?
What does my body tell me when I let it breathe?
This November has proportionated a very intense weeks
internally, many things have moved in my inner self, that is
why the name of the embodied and lived project: “Kotelo,”
the Finnish term to refer to the chrysalis. A transient state of
the transformation of the butterfly, where apparently from the
outside nothing seems to be happening, but inside this rather
unpleasant-looking element there is life and transformation.
Silence, to feel, to hear...
Second photo: Stillness, in a silent dialogue with the art
piece ‘Two Brief Conversations’ (2020) by the artist Luna
Mrozik Gawler.