JULIANA ESPAÑA KELLER – ABOUT

Biography

Dr. Juliana España Keller is a British/Canadian/Swiss Sound and Performance Artist, Curator, Writer and Educator living and working in Malaga, Spain as of January 2020.

Her thesis dissertation: “Sonic Recipes from a Public Kitchen: Participatory Feminist Performance Art” is available here on The University of Melbourne Digital Repository.

Her first journal article appeared in the “Special Issue on Gender Studies and Feminist New Materialism” (2019) and is now available here on MDPI Open Press, Basel, Switzerland and titled: “The Sonic Interface of a Noisy Feminist Social Kitchen”.

This research is also cited in: “Feminist New Materialisms: Activating Ethico-Politics through Genealogies in Social Sciences” edited by Dr. Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Dr. Waltraud Ernst, and Dr. Monika Rogowska-Stangret.

Juliana proposes that her research transforms how geographic places are experienced, emphasizing transformation pedagogically, as a feminist new materialist politic of connection in a posthuman world.

She sees this platform as a model of transdisciplinary inquiry for art and social action. This includes a firm commitment to intersectionality of race, inclusive of gender and to diagnose, infer, and transform gendered, environmental, anthropocentric, and social injustices from a multidimensional angle.

Juliana seeks to ignite and transform our social imagination and through one’s art practice, deactivate pervasive and dominating patriarchal ethico-politics and class domination.

For Juliana, a sonic recipe is a creative act that transverses hierarchies of power relations that organize diverse forms of life. Juliana considers how feminist new materialism can be “put to work”, creating daring dissonant sonic narratives feeding posthuman ethical practices and feminist genealogies. Juliana is responding collectively to the local with a systemic understanding of material phenomena in an immersive sonic performative installation.

Her creative sound performance work/s and sculptural installation project/s strive to engage the public in a relational discourse with the goal of building inclusive, from the ground up associations that have the potential to be small catalysts for change within dominant social systems.

Her projects are mostly audio visual live-art events but can take the form of workshops, adventures, discussions and community social events. Each time the focus is put on making connections that encourage people towards self-reflection and a deeper engagement with society.

This methodology is tangible, explorative, linking sound, sociality; touching on micro-social, musical communities, music and social groups, institutional and political-economical forms as these intra-actions appear diffractively in sound performance work forming a relational site for extensive techniques in sound performance art and feminist participatory practices.

Juliana led a sound performance art collective, “Sonic Electric” in Melbourne, Australia. She has performed in the public socially engaged project: PUBLIC KITCHEN, curated by Kirsha Kaechele at MONA (The Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart, Tasmania and performed with Sonic Electric on several occasions on behalf of Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, Australia. In addition, Sonic Electric have also performed at the “Make-It-Up Club” for experimental sound media.

Juliana is a member of the “SenseLab” in Montreal, Canada. Her final PhD exhibition took place in the Industrial School Building at Abbotsford Convent in April 2019.