Misiondivina is an artists’ collective whose members are Itxaso Corral Arrieta, Oscar Dasí, Diana Gadish, María García Vera, Xavier Manubens and Verónica Navas. We meet each week to pose each other questions and to ponder on issues that derive from our practices: performance, the performing and visual arts, dance, film, music and writing.

It is not easy to find the time to see each other on a regular basis, but rather than just an organisational matter, this constancy is a form of research and perseverance: the desire to interrupt our rapid rhythms in order to make other relationship spaces possible. Misiondivina is interested in the exploration and construction of these relationship spaces and times that defy the dominant modes of production; in bringing personal desires, issues and questions into play as the driving force and activator of these collective spaces of research and the sharing of learning. In this way, we seek a state of encounter with the other and with the other that is moving away, if only temporarily, from the need to produce and from the fixation with the result.

The focus of our research is knowledge that proceeds above all from the body. Taking as our starting point our differing individual artistic practices and comparing and contrasting them, we generate webs of discoveries, suggestions and clues regarding the knowledge of a body circulated and traversed far outside conceptual channels. We are interested in shattering hierarchical constructs to do with knowledge, and we believe that the knowledge of the body is speaking to us and moving us far beyond these hierarchies. We are also linked by an ephemeral character, that which cannot be grasped in the live arts that leaves no ‘objectual’ trace but which is capable of generating a particular memory of the experience, of the skin, in the body of the person receiving and engaging in it.

We are moved by the ability to share these relationship spaces and times and the circulation of knowledge with others outside our collective. We meet, we are, we remain in order to be able to continue seeking understanding with other people in contexts that may be artistic or not. Because we believe that it is possible through artistic practices and research to distil the tools of life that can help us to envision other realities, other bodies.

Our most recent project, Vamos a aprender juntas a hacer cosas que no sabemos y que tenemos muchas ganas de aprender, which was recently presented at the Teatro Pradillo in Madrid, explores these issues around meeting others and taking the time to be and learn together to share knowledge, to expand the idea of what the body is and to foster the appearance of other possible bodies, to strip away the mystery of what is or is not encompassed within the boundaries of art; an invitation that is midway between shared artistic practices, the collective workshop of impossible learning and the sporadic emergence of performing moments.

This could also define Misiondivina: an invitation that is midway, with impossibles, with miraculous appearances and with a lot of time for breathing.

Biography made in 2018