MAPA

Two performers and a musician navigate shifting roles through scores and games, continuously redefining their relationships to each other and their surroundings. Textiles take centre stage, shaping movement and connection, weaving a dreamlike narrative of ancestry and belonging.

MAPA is a multidisciplinary performance that blends movement, sound, and visual elements into a poetic exploration of migration and cross-continental trajectories. Emerging from an ongoing artistic research project, it playfully investigates how we create new ways of relating and being together.

"We set out to create new worlds—their rules, their roles, their goals, their treasures. We do this by shifting our senses, by expanding them: the tactile, the sonic, the movement, the invisible, the tissues. We recalibrate our poles and fine-tune our antennae. We set out to test their borders. We do this by imagining our ancestors—their traditions, their folklore, their dances, their people, their landscapes. We softly lean on them, borrowing and transforming their tools, which are our tools. We raise a flag and throw it down a mountain. As it lands, we observe the birth of a new island."

• Federico Protto is a Uruguayan artist based in Brussels. His multidisciplinary artistic practice—spanning performance, text, voice, fashion, and sculpture—explores migration and its movements. Federico is interested in how individual and collective identities are shaped and investigates what can broadly be termed ancestral knowledge. His work has been presented at Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (FR), ModaLisboa (PT), MOMU Fashion Museum (BE), De Singel (BE), and Centro Cultural de España en Montevideo (UY), among others. He holds a diploma in fashion design from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT) and a postgraduate degree in artistic research from a.pass – advanced performance and scenographic studies, Brussels (BE).