ziREjA
ZirejA. Passionate for the arts of movement, in 2006 she began attending courses imparted by professional dancers in the Canary Islands (Ingrid Medina, Helena Berthelius, Carlota Mantecón, Laura Marrero…). By bringing together her two passions, photography and the body, these courses inspired and motivated her creativity.
As of 2008 she began her career as the author of her own creations under the pseudonym “ziREjA”. In 2011 she moved to Ghana where she was able to enhance her body techniques thanks to such contemporary African dancers as Yaw Nti and Aida Colmenero from Spain. She performed and collaborated in various contemporary art projects with international artists, which allowed her to develop a global perspective of the conceptual basis of her work. Her experience in West Africa not to mention her studies as a Bachelor in Business Administration and Management also awoke in her an environmental and indeed global awareness of the economy and of the human being. On her return to the Canary Islands, working now as a creator, she received a European photography award for her photography “The Waste Coast”. This allowed her to disseminate her work and to appear in international media. From 2012 to 2016, she studied under several national artists in a number of master classes and workshops in contemporary performing arts, most notably in the LEAL.LAV project which was curated by the artist Javier Caves, in the “Performativity Encounters” and the Sitio Festival which was curated by the dancer Masu Fajardo. Thanks to the training she received, she was able to enhance her scenic creations which began to take shape in 2015 with the projects “iTrash”, “a Packaging” or “Plastisize”. All these projects involved a line of investigation which focused on the passage of human beings over the face of the earth and the effects of mass consumption on the environment. More recently, Irene has also developed her artistic mediation project “Yes We Trash” within the programme “Un artista viene a vernos” (An Artist Comes to See Us) set up by TEA (Tenerife Espacio de las Artes), whose goal is to integrate contemporary art into the everyday activities that take place in Canary Island classrooms. She is currently working on her artistic project “unPackaging” for the Tenerife Auditorium, after having been selected for the third edition of the “Teatro en la Escuela” (Theatre in Schools) programme, which is part and parcel of the Tenerife 2030 Strategy.
The Pine Needle. La Pinocha (The Pine Needle) is the second part of a group of scenic pieces based on a research work focused on the body and movement which started with “uNpACKAGING”, a piece featuring plastic waste materials that came into existence following the experience lived in a scenic research workshop led by Esther Blázquez and David Pérez, during the 2nd Performative Encounter in Tenerife. In this second piece, the performer once again exposes her body to waste, albeit of organic origin on this occasion, such as the needles and branches of the Canary Island pine tree. Using the exhibition of her own body as a political instrument, emptied in its context and manipulated in its day-to-day life, the artist proposes a filling process, both physical and metaphorical, in which the audience will take part. In an act of eco-feminist expression and with the help of the audience, the performer will create an action that takes place from somewhere that has been seized and transmuted into worthy consumerism, through which she is only allowed to reconnect with her own self through the pseudo-liberation that is provided by meditation exercises that are prefabricated by the very society that is consuming her.