aniara rodado

artist · choreographer · researcher

Beyond dance and the human body: countercolonial experimentation with bodies, plants, substances and technologies

Currently

Bonche Archivo (Installation & Performance in collaboration with Camilo Martinez)
2026 10-19/09/2026
Festival de la Imagen Manizales, Bogotá, Colombia

Trans-Species Intelligence and Embodied Cosmotechnics (Research Residency with composer Luca Forcucci)
23/09-03/10/ 2026
-i2ADS – School of Music and Performing Arts, University of Porto, Portugal

Conference: Flying Cream and Roundtable with Helen Torres and Loredana Wolpe 13–16/11/2026
XVII Sui Generis Festival,
Casa del Lector, Matadero, Madrid, Spain

Selected Work

Installation "Flying cream a person watching the "Witches" exhibition

FLYING CREAM

series

cream · installation · performances · fanzine · moving image · web visual essay

hands, flying cream, dildo, container
Flying Cream banner featuring a combination of photos and drawings
Performance, Woman Flies with an Obsidian Mirror flying cream performance
Details on the Installation of an Alkaloid Extractor flying cream exhibition witches
A trans man applies Flying Cream. Installation: "Against Witch-washing"
video installation  against witch washig whith audience

Flying ointment was traditionally associated with European witches, yet its actual nature was largely erased by the censorship surrounding psychoactive plants and vulvas. In my project Flying Cream, I take this story as a starting point to investigate the historical erasure of knowledge. I bring ancestral plant knowledge into dialogue with contemporary biotechnology. During an art/science residency with Génialis Biotech, I developed a cream designed to treat vaginal dryness. I also created a manifesto, “Against Witch Washing,” an installation, three live performances, a fanzine, and a web-based visual essay.

artificial life & intelligence

TIRED SOIL, EXUBERANT LIFE

series

installation · performance · publication · moving image

banana leaf mat coca para comer installation
Person with a hand-held sprayer standing on a mat made of banana leaves—performance coca para comer
knitted installation, hands knitting, hands knitting with needles, 2-person performance AGAVE
woven installation, dancers in motion, AGAVE performance
Sebucan—a woven piece with fluorescent-colored ribbons; a two-channel video installation Yuca brava at the Impakt exhibition

Agave, Coca, and Yuca Brava grow in poor soils and places under intense sunlight, yet have sustained communities across Abya Yala for thousands of years. These plants have also been entangled in wars, extraction, displacement, and the forced migration of species and peoples. In this trilogy, I take this paradox as a starting point to ask what knowledge survives when a plant is forced to migrate, and how these migrations might reconfigure our world at a time of accelerating global soil impoverishment. I bring situated plant practice into dialogue with biologists, weavers, anthropologists, elders, growers, and processors who continue to live and work with these plants.

The trilogy has developed through material and artistic experimentation in Mexico and Colombia: with Agave, a woven installation, performance and publication; with Coca, a documentary video installation and performance developed in dialogue with Nasa and Misak communities in Cauca and drawing on my own family archive; and with Yuca Brava, an ongoing research process in Inírida involving cassava biopolymers, publication, performance, chemical transformations with gold, moving image and the sebucán.

TRANSMUTATION DE BASE / ALIEN-MIGRATION

choreographic installation

standing dancer performing Basic Transmutation- Alien/Migration, in an installation of transparent tubes and distillers
A dancer crouching in front of a percolator, with the audience behind colorful remnants from the tubes of the installation Basic transmutation -Alien/Migration*,
Close-up of a distiller with eucalyptus leaves suspended by metal wires and transparent tubes over a heating blanket; installation Basic Transmutation- Alien/ Migration,

Transmutation de base / Alien-Migration takes eucalyptus as a starting point to investigate how ideas of migration, race, labour, and displacement are projected onto plant life. Often reduced to a fast-growing imported tree that ends up damaging biodiversity, eucalyptus has its own complex history of movement, extraction, and transformation across territories.

During residencies at Emmetrop in Bourges, at the fluid mechanics laboratory of École Polytechnique, and at Rural Scapes in Minas Gerais, Brazil, I developed an immersive and participatory installation in which the audience moves through a space shaped by the plant itself. Through distillation, smell, sound, and movement, the piece asks what happens when we stop assuming that we already know how a plant should be understood.