Sacudida

2020
Video Choreography & Digital Performance
Brussels

Sacudida is a video choreography by Júlia Rúbies Subirós, developed in close collaboration with musician and sound artist Pablo Lilienfeld during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, when both artists were living as neighbors. Originally conceived as a live solo performance for her graduation from the Bachelor dance programme in Antwerp, the work was radically reconfigured into a screen-based choreography in response to the pandemic. This tactical shift from stage to screen became a primary conceptual framework to engage with the mediated, fragmented realities of a world in suspension.

Emerging from an ongoing dialogue on how social architectures condition artistic production, the piece takes the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland as an intellectual point of departure. While the text frames fear as an individual psychological obstacle, Sacudida expands this inquiry to dissect fear as a systemic mechanism embedded within neoliberal structures of productivity, precarity, and enforced isolation. Through an embodied lens, the work maps the stark contradictions of confinement: stillness and acceleration, intimacy and distance, care and systemic collapse.

Transposing movement entirely to a digital desktop environment, Sacudida utilizes screen recordings, video calls, text documents, and browser tabs to treat the interface as a physical stage. Fragmentation and informational excess become central compositional strategies, mirroring a physical body shaped by dispersed attention and digital overstimulation. A recorded vocal exchange (structured as a fractured podcast) runs throughout the work, weaving together immediate reflections while slowly disintegrating into the surrounding electronic noise. Meaning "to shake off" in Spanish, Sacudida gestures toward a visceral desire to dislodge inherited structures, choosing to inhabit a space of profound uncertainty rather than offering a clean resolution.

Concept and Choreography: Júlia Rúbies Subirós
Sound Design and Musical Collaboration: Pablo Lilienfeld
Medium: Desktop video performance, digital choreography, and audio text