Olga Mesa (Avilés, Asturias, 1962) is a key figure of the new Spanish contemporary dance of the late eighties, but, above all, she has been a trailblazer in researching the relationships between the audiovisual and the corporeal, real times and submerged times, and experiments with the analogical and digital worlds of Retrofuturism.

After an extensive career in Spain, Olga Mesa settled permanently in France in 2005 after being invited by the Théâtre Pôle Sud in Strasbourg to be a resident artist.

Since her first video artwork in the Mojave Desert (Arizona) to the premier of Lugares intermedios (Places In-Between) with her own company, both in 1992, the artist has developed in her works the writing of an experimental dramaturgy deliberately situated on the borderlines between dance, performance, filmmaking and installation.

Her work revolves around a poetic writing of the personal body, affirming the place of the intimate within the performance. She integrates the Other, turning the spectator into an agent of the performance and constructor of new narratives through spatial journeys. With her actions, whether in theatres in the form of representations, in performances, videos in multiple layers of possibilities, art installations, transmission protocols, conferences or publications, Olga Mesa encourages arborescent readings, provoking an expansion of the artistic fact in the subconscious of each gaze.

Her unique language is applied to concepts such as paused look, close body, choreogram (the basic choreogram and its evolution), the mechanics of sensation, (2D) decision and desire, enounciation, off-camera, depth of field, blind camera, black-out, body operator, double vision or Rec-Play-Rewind sequence.

She has turned the camera into an accomplice, thanks to which she combines the spatial and temporal experience and the framing of the gaze, turning the body into an instrument of vision that positions it as both the subject and the object of her narrative constructions.

This sensitive and conceptual journey responds to the urgent need for a new policy on the body and look, by virtue of which the artist, through her creative proposals, questions the presence of the Other and her relationship with the strata of reality.

Since 2010, Olga Mesa has been working with the artist Francisco Ruiz de Infante. The cohesion of this entire trajectory has led her to produce large thematic works that develop over time in different movements and acts, scales and temporalities, processes and places of dialogue.

This retrospective exhibition offers a selection of relevant pieces envisaged as a guided tour through texts, videos, images and bodies. The immersive journey through the exhibition spaces provides a ritual of knowledge about the artist’s methodology, modes of exploration and narratives.