Flavia Pinheiro is an Amsterdam-based choreographer, performer and educator from Brazil. Her research foregrounds networks of resilience and resistance to systems of knowledge by fabulative speculations in Interspecies Choreography. Her artistic practice in an ongoing attempt to create breathing and vital conditions; in an unstoppable dance she creates improbable exchanges with the more than humans  such as bacteria, plants, birds, antelopes and ghosts. She focuses on states of survival and refusal of captivity by proposing a radical onto- epistemological turn. She navigates in different medias (photography, video, performance, urban interventions, installation, writing) to underline how diversity and transversality can contribute to (un)learn colonial pedagogies. As a researcher and teacher Flavia worked in public universities, schools and different institutions in the Netherlands and Brazil.
She graduate at DAS Choreography Master Program,  (2022) and  she is currently fellow at  DAS Third research program with the project M.I.M.O.S.A. In 2021, she was granted by The Fonds Podiumkunsten (NL). Her graduation piece 7 Abiku Solos for 11 Bacteria Falling Through was supported by Aart Janszen Fund and was awarded with Andre Veltkamp Beurs Grant. In 2022 Flavia Pinheiro was awarded the 3Package Deal fund for International Talents by AFK for the ‘Engaged Art’ coalition. She is currently a PHD candidate at Leiden Univerty in PHD ARTS.

For more visit her website.

This research project is about Mimosa Pudica as an important co-operation partner. I propose to work with these plants because they are particularly sensitive to touch. The project focus on understanding how touch can contribute to epistemological change; and how interspecies choreography can find a way to move between sources of knowledge to unlearn colonial pedagogies.Methodologically, the research invites movement practice, improvisation, touch based encounters and speculative writing based on the modes of existence of the mimosa plant. This includes the creation of performative scores informed by experiences and narratives of the plant, possibilities of learning through touch, stories of migration, and images related to captivity and botany. The aim is to understand and create tools for a 'plant-like life practice‘.The research project seeks to develop notions of how human and more than human realms can be bridged through touch and how this can promote awareness of other ways of knowing. What past and imagined future histories can be uncovered and remembered through touch? In what ways can interspecies touch and choreography offer new imaginaries?Being with mimosas is an attempt to choreograph configurations of worlds we cannot yet imagine and to question how and with whom we learn.