Sonya Lindfors & SERAFINE1369 Discursive Dinner

Sonya Lindfors is a Cameroonian-Finnish choreographer, artistic director, facilitator and educator who graduated with an MA in choreography from the University of Arts Helsinki in 2013.

She is the Artistic Director and founding member of UrbanApa, an interdisciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community that offers a platform for new ideas and feminist art practices. UrbanApa hosts workshops, festivals, labs, mentoring and publications among other things.

Lindfors makes her own and collaborative productions, curated programmes and performative actions. Her performance works have been shown and supported by Beursschouwburg, Kampnagel, Spring Utrecht, CODA – festival, Black Box Theater Oslo, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance among others. She is a member of Miracle Workers Collective which represented Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Lindfors’ recent works We Should All Be Dreaming, Soft Variations Online and camouflage centre around questions of Blackness and Black body politics, representation and power structures. In all her positions she pursues creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, using festivals, performances, publications or workshops to operate as the site of empowerment and radical collective dreaming.

Lindfors has been awarded several prizes, including the international Live Art Anti Prize 2018 and the State Prize for Public Information in 2022.

SERAFINE1369 is busy with propositions and practices – of dancing, spatial arrangement, sonics and modes of receiving – that counter the tendency towards bodily compression, inflammation and alienation, invited by life in the hostile architectures of the metropolis. The non-linear passage of time, cycles and systems of counting have a recurrent thematic presence in their work, themes of being haunted and being trapped. Their body and movement studies focus on electricity and water – nervous systems and their transpersonal functioning. This approach acknowledges the cosmic oneness of all things as manifested through the ecologies of relation and the fact that everything is made of the same stuff, whilst being intensely curious about the magic and mysteries of life processes of distinction, variation, cycles, decomposition; movement as it transforms and sustains.

The political implications of this work encourage an anti-colonial, anti-assimilationist practice concerned with the integrity and efficacy of structures (bodily and social), collaboration, hosting and an interest in somatics, semiotics and symbiotics from a body-led, experiential position.

Often layering references from subculture and esoteric practices, SERAFINE1369 makes bold, subtle, aesthetic, sensual, live and visual work that deals in intensities; atmospheres created by the tensions between things that make meaning, implicating the bodies of audiences as well as performers and using movement as a tool for flattening hierarchies of perception between visible and invisible (felt / sensed / remembered) presences. They understand working with bodies is working with vibration – sound, light, frequency; their performances are containers, frames or machines, that conjure weathers and many voices through the interplay between dancing, sound, objects, words and light. These lines of tension create a sense of expansion, dimension, dissonance and resonance.