Elisabete Finger – Artist in Residence 2023

Elisabete Finger is a brazilian choreographer and performer. Her creations investigate the materiality and anatomy of bodies and things, exposing textures, densities, forms, and fluids in situations that explore the borders between delight and disturbance. Through the contact-collision of different materials, she experiments logics guided by sensations and eroticisms, which often rub against meanings and social or cultural expectations. She studied Law / Public Politics in Brazil, Dance and Choreography in different places such as the Essais program at CNDC d’Angers (France) and the MA SODA (UdK/HZT, Berlin). She is back in Berlin since 2021, maintaining ongoing collaborations in Brazil and other countries. Finger was a fellow of the Martin Roth Initiative 2021/2022, and in 2023 is a resident artist at Radialsystem, in the frame of Weltoffenes Berlin fellowship.

Finger's personal story exemplifies the political defamation and instrumentalization of contemporary art forms and their actors, conducted by a globally strengthening radical right– in this specific case, by Jair Bolsonaro's government in Brazil. It is no coincidence that precisely those art forms that critically engage with the body and its social and political constitution, as well as its relationship to the environment and to other bodies, are at the centre of political repression. The emancipatory and transformative potential that emanates from these artistic approaches develops a social impact beyond art and is therefore especially threatening to undemocratic mentalities.