Mani_bonding_festo

Mani-bonding–festo is an artistic research project exploring sustainable choreographies for co-existence. How do we collaboratively imagine, practice, and reinvent togetherness and collectivity in times of polarization? Searching for answers and in an expedition to listen to the voices of others, Maria invites people into a manicure session: Mani - the nail salon sessions. By holding their hands, she commits to sense the other’s otherness. The hands become a site for encountering the other through touch, weight, texture, temperature and smell. The conversations generated in these encounters will be the starting point for Festo. In Festo - dancing together, Maria works on translating aspects of Mani through a choreographic and performative vantage point.

• Maria Ferreira Silva (1988) is a Brussels based dance artist. She engages with the artistic field through entanglements, reflecting on the intersection of the roles she embodies on and off stage. Maria’s dance education began at the age of six, performing in her hometown in shows organized by her dance teacher Fernanda Mafra, followed by the National Conservatory of Lisbon, P.A.R.T.S. (with the support from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), and Uniarts (NPP program) in Stockholm. In her most recent creation, Wild Explosion of Radical Softness (2025), she uses her body and a large piece of textile to evoke dances of the past, present, and future, inviting the audience into a co-fabulation. Currently, she is developing the artistic research project Mani-bonding-festo where she explores sustainable choreographies of coexistence through collaboratively imagining, practicing, and reinventing togetherness and collectivity. Parallel to her choreographic work Maria engages in the works of Trajal Harrell as a dancer, and with Lisa Vereertbrugghen, Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx, Diego Echegoyen as outside eye.