Titre 1
Celia Stroom is a multidisciplinary person in the full swing; a researcher, an art producer, a singer, a dancer, a textile artisan, a digital artist. She designs dreamlike spaces to awaken on a profound level human emotions through immersive websites, surrealist performances, sensual poetry, labyrinthine exhibitions, intimate choreographies, photo-video reportage of her nomadic projects. She has been living in Liege, Tbilisi, Bangkok, Tashkent, Kolkata, Bishkek, Athens, Berlin.
- Born in 1983 in Paris
- BA CND - Centre National de la Danse - Choreography
- BA Conservatoire de Paris - Opera singing & Polyphonic studies
- MA History & Ethnography, Université Paris-1 Sorbonne
- MA Museology, Université Paris-1 Sorbonne
- MA Cultural Management, , Université Paris-3 Sorbonne
- BA Art History, Université Paris-1 Sorbonne.
> . CV
> . CURATOR'S STATEMENT - Interview on "Call for curators"
PERFORMING ARTS | She first studied dance, opera singing, and polyphonic music and working as a classical singer, a vocalist performer and a vocal coach for dancers, actors and visual artists. She also studied folk songs travelling since 2016 in Caucasus & Central Asia regions where she has been meticulously archiving field recordings. She challenges her ways of practising the voice and the body movement inspired by women leaders in performing arts such as Anna Halprin, Meredith Monk and Ute Wassermann. She co-funded in Paris in 2010 the ensemble La Tempete where she initiated her exploration of what she calls "moving voices”. By writing simple choreographical shapes for classical singers, she strives to develop a performing arts practice where voice and movements lead the artists to a state of trance, freeing thus an expression of the intimate through the whole body. > SHOWREEL
She developed her choreographic & polyphonic experimentations in the frame of her company Kunstwollen, created in 2014 where singing is interwoven with many other practices such as dance, perfume, textile art, assemblages, sculptures, video, sound art
> VIMEO
Since 2019, she has been tutoring to visual, digital and sound artists new skills in performing arts and live expressions, in the frame of the itinerant biennale The Enclosed Garden > festival WEBSITE
MUSEOLOGY | From the perspective of becoming an art producer and creating one day an art centre, she first studied at La Sorbonne University Collection Care, Museology, Cultural Management, and Art history. After her first experience in 2008, working as a curator for Musee du Louvre, she started a career as a freelancer museum expert. Since then, she was commissioned by more than 20 museums to research on collections' DNA, their history, expertise their health conditions, and curate scientific & cultural program for new museums. She is working under her father's name as a museum expert ( Celia Ragueneau) > Museum Management website
ART DIRECTION | | After hours spent in the silence of museum storage spaces, her performances and installations are strongly inspired by all the artwork that she encountered there. If music and choreography are 2 tentacles of her octopus body, museums are the temple where she has trained her eye accurately to create the performance series L'Oeil Ecoute | The Eye Listens (+), which aims to create multisensory happenings where she merges her skills as an art historian, singer, choreographer, composer and visual artist to create new imaginaries based on for the Surrealism & Synesthesia phenomenon. This project happens in museums, art galleries and private events.
PRODUCTION & CURATION | In search of expanding her exploration of multidisciplinary shows and taking women & ecology as its centre, she launched in Berlin in 2019 the collective studio of research, creation & production Heroines' Wave. Every year, she is developing a long term research on women artists conditions & struggles in developing countries. She has been encountering women in Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, India, and in 2014 Armenia. Later, some fieldwork gave birth to cooperation projects throughout the nomadic festival The Enclosed Garden (2019 Georgia, 2021 Thailand, 2023 Austria, co-produced by Goethe Institut, Institut Francais, IFA).
Women interviews are also shared anonymously on digital and sound projects in order to make their realities visible and audible worldwide.
> 31 gardens - digital platform for 31 women from 23 countries
> The w(e)ave - digital platform for queer intimate stories
L'Oeil Ecoute - film (Salomé Jashi) performance direction (Celia Stroom) Writers' House Tbilisi, Georgia, 2020.
video essay developed during quarantine - isolated in Bangkok State hotel for 18 days
TOPICS OF INTEREST | Mining traces of forgotten stories, Celia nurtures a strong interest in the intimate, the hidden, the raw essence of who we are. She devotes her life to exploring through readings, interviews, fieldwork, the human emotional functioning, and the labyrinthine psychology of the Self. Like an archaeologist of emotions, she meticulously excavates every detail captured by her hyperesthesia. Later she transfigures her perception of her version of reality in poetry, performances, installations, music compositions, polyphonies, and choreographies.
There, she strives to create connections between humans beings that grew in different times, societies, and cultures to highlight similarities, always trying to find somewhere a point of conciliation among people. She investigates the symbolism of ancient stories, spiritual rituals worldwide, and stories from people she met on her nomadic journey to illuminate how intimate feelings can be shared and how personal identity cannot be defined without others.
She also focuses on psychological / neuro architecture as the format, shapes and shades of spaces, how objects are displayed within, lighting, colours, acoustics, and aesthetics influence her psychology in hyperesthesia. Whether a website, an exhibition, poetry, choreography or music, they are all "spaces" where she plays with subliminal / hidden ways to affect how the audience feels in her exhibition space or webspace.
KEY QUESTIONS |
The main focus of my projects revolves around these points:
>> What intense immersive experience can we offer to people living in an impersonal, suffering, isolating era?
>> What can new experiences for the body within a space (digital or physical) be invented?
>> What is our responsibility as inventors of new events format and new art devices?
>> What active role do we offer to the audience?
And how what we create can stimulate the senses and, to some extent, the emotions to make people feel more sensitive.
This website is a personal artwork, by © celia stroom 2022