Núria Guiu
Núria Guiu Sagarra is a dancer and choreographer based in Barcelona. Her artistic practice explores the relationship between bodies, images and power dynamics from a personal, sociocultural and speculative perspective. Her works investigate the complexities of contemporary culture through an anthropological lens, especially in relation to digital environments, memory and affect. Her creations also expand into movement practices, writing and teaching derived from the same artistic research. Her works include Supermedium, Medium, Cyberexorcisme, Spiritual Boyfriends and Likes.
P.O.V.
Residence June 2026
She now arrives at El Canal with POV, a performative piece that stages a central question: who looks, how we look, and what the gaze does to bodies. The proposal articulates word, image and presence within a hybrid scenic device, situated between thinking out loud, critical exposition and performative action, in order to explore how visual and discursive language constructs forms of perception, classification and power.
In a context marked by a sense of collective powerlessness, where it often seems easier to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to the current system, POV addresses the tension between what we “should be” and what we can actually sustain. The piece observes how hypervisual culture produces a regime of constant excess: we coexist with the voyeurism of headlines and images of extreme violence while being required to project an image of control, success and permanent wellbeing. Between self-demand and saturation, discomfort remains repressed, displaced or turned into spectacle, because today what we appear to be seems to matter more than what we are.
Artistic credits
Direction, choreography, text and performer / Núria Guiu Sagarra
Artistic support / Esther Freixa i Ràfols
Music / Uge Pañeda (Okkre)
Set and lighting design / Cube
Costume design / Silvia Delagneau
Technical assistance / Adrià Juan
Production / Ariadna Miquel and El ClimaMola
Co-production / Centre de les Arts Lliures of the Fundació Joan Brossa, Festival Tanz Rhein-Main
Project in residence at / Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque (Madrid), Roca Umbert, Fàbrica de les Arts (Granollers), with a cross-residency at El Graner in Barcelona, Festival Santarcangelo.
nuriaguiu.com
The work begins from physical and performative language as a form of thought. Drawing on her background as a dancer and anthropologist, Núria Guiu approaches the body not as a mere support for discourse, but as a site of knowledge production: a body traversed by archives, gazes, expectations and social narratives. On stage, speech coexists with gesture, posture and presence, activating a corporeal writing that calls into question the separation between saying and doing, between explaining and performing.
Starting from a visual archive on hysteria, the meme culture of social media, mythology and pop references, POV takes the form of a staged lecture in which postures, images and words clash with one another. The piece does not offer solutions or closure, but instead opens up a space where failure, repetition and rupture become forms of thought and possibility.
The residency at El Canal is a technical residency, focused especially on work with lighting design, video, scenography and sound. In this way, the project continues its creative journey after passing through venues such as the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque in Madrid, Roca Umbert Fàbrica de les Arts in Granollers, with a cross-residency at El Graner in Barcelona, and festivals and centres such as Santarcangelo and Tanz Rhein-Main.
