Lecciones de Baile: Julia Bianco

Julia O. Bianco, Lecciones de Baile (Dance Lessons), 2017.

Lecciones de Baile
Location TBA

For her participation in Mud + Blue, Julia Bianco’s video Lecciones de Baile will be projected in a one-night-only outdoor projection in Houston’s historically Latinx East End neighborhood. The video performance documents Bianco practicing zamba on the roof of a Los Angeles building. The artist, who left Argentina several years ago to study in the U.S., was the only member of her family who did not dance the choreographies that marked many of her family relationships and events. At a distance from home, she began to learn the dances through videos that her family sent her, practicing with her new city’s landscape in the near distance. Thinking about distance and the reasons we leave home, the piece invokes melancholy and the maintenance of family bonds through bodily traditions. How do we remember a place through our physical movements? How might a new landscape necessitate new ways of moving? What does constant movement allow us to know, especially in a landscape haunted by hurt and always awaiting new crises?

Bianco attended the Escuela de Arte Fotográfico de Avellaneda before earning her BFA from Universidad del Museo Social Argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina) in 2011. In 2018, she graduated from the MFA program at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her art practice negotiates collective and family heritage, the present and the place. Considering the past from an experience – and a body – constantly in motion, her latest work draws from her everyday life to create objects, installations and time-based media. Her work has been shown at Espacio Ecléctico (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Galería Tres Puntos (Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco) and in SUR: biennial (Cerritos College Art Gallery, Cerritos, CA), among other spaces.

Mud + Blue is a curatorial project by Laura August, supported by the IDEA Fund.