Paula Montecinos Oliva

choreographer, sound artist, and researcher

Paula Montecinos Oliva is a choreographer, sound artist, and researcher whose practice is grounded on the affordances of dance and live-sound performance. With an embodied, decolonial, and technofeminist approach, her practice embraces the physical and spatial dynamics of sonic experience, and questions the materiality of sound, listening, and movement through DIY analog synthesis, experimental vocals, and the research of frequency phenomena and somatics.

Montecinos Oliva’s project—Sonic Fabulative Feminism—within the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, explores the extension of the radiophonic format as a performative space that links bodies, listening, sonic archives, and vibrations to the experiences of those diasporic to the Global South. With an interest on re- and decomposing relational paradigms, timelines and historical memories, her research delves into the fabulative territories of sounds, working with them as carriers of a poetic-political argument, with the potential to dislocate the linearity of space, time, and language.

Montecinos Oliva’s work has been presented at Transmediale, Berlin, 2023; HKW, Berlin, 2022; New Alphabet School, Warsaw, 2022; Q-02, Brussels, 2022; wpZimmer, Antwerp, 2022; Sonic Matter, Zurich, 2021; Sonic Acts: Shock Waves, Amsterdam, 2021; and Come Together, Amsterdam, 2020; among others.

Montecinos Oliva is a current fellow at DAS THIRD, Amsterdam. She also teaches and co-organizes the movement laboratory Latinx Memories, co-creating a teaching-learning environment with trans-kuir migrants and asylum seekers living in the Netherlands. She lives and works in Amsterdam and is part of the BAK Cell, Utrecht, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice