Straddling Barcelona, Pamplona and the Atacama Desert, AzkonaToloza are a pair of artists who create stage projects closely connected with the living arts, visual poetry and historical research.

They have been working since 2015 on making stage documentaries that explore the relationship between the new forms of colonialism and barbarism and their link with contemporary culture. To this end, they reclaim contemporary languages, in almost all instances connected with the idea of the here and now, as a tool for rereading official history and for delving into the origins of some of the conflicts taking place today.

They are interested in the reconstruction and contemplation of stage landscapes and their playwriting, which encompasses performance and audiovisual language, positions the action, words and movements of human beings on the periphery of the stage, using them as just another of the tools employed and not placing them centre-stage.

Txalo Toloza-Fernández trained as a video artist in Santiago de Chile and as a stage performer and creator in Barcelona, where he has lived since 1997. In 2005, he set up the MiPrimerDrop AV studio, which specialises in creation for living arts pieces. His hallmark is that he only uses mobile phones to take images. A member of the stage director Roger Bernat’s company, Toloza-Fernández also works regularly with the performer Sònia Gómez.

Laida Azkona Goñi was born in Pamplona and has lived in Barcelona since 2011. She trained as a dancer in London, Austria and New York and since then she has specialised in research, creation and acting in the transdisciplinary performing arts. The director of the Festival Inmediaciones in Pamplona and a co-founder of the Hierba Roja stage collective, she has also worked as a performer for Francesco Scavetta, Juschka Weigel and Noémie Lafrance, among others. 

Biography made in 2018