This text is from a conversation that took place at the Dias Das Dança Festival 2026, on the 13th of April as a part of the Live Art Writers Network programme at A PiSCiNA, featuring contributions from Pedro Vilela, Dori Nigro and Tiziano Cruz.
These bodies in this city: situated landscapes in performance and critical writing
How might performance and creative/critical writing become practices that belong and echo the city and those who live in it? This conversation brings together performers with a socially engaged practice and writers to reflect collectively on the role of performance within a city. Moving from within and beyond institutional and festival contexts, the discussion asks what performance can offer to everyday life, and how it might address, interrupt, or speak back to the city and its communities. The conversation convenes performers working in socially engaged ways alongside critics interested in writing that carries a social dimension, writing that reaches beyond the art world echo chamber and remains accountable to lived experience, public space, and civic life.
Tiziano Cruz’s participation is made possible by the “Cidades Fragmentadas” residency series, an architecture, research, and art program organized by the Frame Colectivo studio, which explores forms of socio-spatial segregation in the Lisbon metropolitan area and the practices of resistance emerging from marginalized communities. The program will take place in 2026 at the c/arpa space in Lisbon.
This contribution by Tiziano Cruz was originally given in Spanish, and translated to English for publication. See the Spanish version here.
The other interventions, by Dori Nigro and Pedro Vilela, can be accessed HERE.
I am from the north of Argentina, from an Indigenous Quechua and Aymara community. I mention this because it is the place I come from and the place my body occupies within the art market. It positions my thinking and my actions within the field of the arts, and above all, shapes the work I have been producing over the years.
I belong to a part of Latin America, specifically Argentina, that lives not only on the geographic periphery, but also on a social, economic, and cultural periphery. Based on this experience, I have built a way of thinking by asking myself certain questions that I want to share as a starting point for reflecting on the issues we have been discussing today, issues related to ‘public’ and ‘private’ space: who decides what is considered public and what is considered private? Who defines where the centre is, and what is pushed to the periphery? And how are these categories connected to one another?
For a long time now, as an artist and cultural worker — and I think many of us here come from artistic or research-based practices — I have been asking myself: where do each of us position ourselves? Are we producing private or public forms of thought? And how do we turn these questions into a lived reflection within artistic practice?
We often think that the field of art creates a public space, like this one now. But I ask whether this space is truly public. Whether or not we come close to an answer, the point is precisely to generate collective thinking about this question, a reflection on what place we truly occupy within the field of art and what kinds of spaces we create through our work in the performing arts.
And this has to do both with the creation of artistic material and with the positions occupied by those of us who are programmers, resident artists, or coordinators of spaces, festivals, and so on.
What do we generate? Do we generate the periphery? Do we generate the center? And within those spaces we create, where do bodies fit in? Where are we interested in having the bodies of “ordinary” people exist within this vast market that is the art market, where all of us are gathered today having this discussion?
A long time ago, I began asking myself how to generate real change through artistic practice, because I felt that art was absolutely useless, that it could not create real change. What drives my practice is this question: what strategies do we use to create real change in the everyday lives of ordinary people? This has to do with how to create a way of thinking that is truly collective, communal, and above all, public.
Because many times we believe our work to be public, but in reality we are thinking only for ourselves, right? And that thinking never reaches the other person, the one walking down the street, or the one we pass in the subway, in supermarkets. So I ask: who are we making what we make for?
My way of understanding art is truly as a tool for social transformation that can genuinely create change.
I want to share an experience, very briefly, about how I arrived at this conclusion. In 2020, when the COVID pandemic began, I was working for the government of the city of Buenos Aires, in the Ministry of Culture. A quarantine was declared in Argentina that lasted ten months. In the first days, repatriation hotels or COVID hotels were created, spaces that housed Argentine people returning from abroad. Everyone returning to the country had to be isolated for fifteen or twenty days because they could be infected. It was considered dangerous for those people to move freely in public.
Overnight, all of us from the Ministry of Culture came under the Ministry of Health. From one day to the next, we stopped being artists and became healthcare workers. For ten months I worked in that space, and what we did was bring people food, medication, ask them how they had woken up, whether they were okay or not; suddenly we were psychologists too.
That was when I understood that I really was making a real change, even if it was not something tangible. But it was a real change in other people’s lives. If I did not bring them their medication or food, if I did not ask how they were doing, it was a decisive factor for them. So I began asking myself how to transfer that into artistic practice. I do not know if I have the answer, but I do have possible approaches.
In 2022, I created a performance called Soliloquio, a project that has traveled to more than twenty countries over three years and works with Andean, Latin American, migrant communities, and different diasporas. The great challenge was: how do we introduce these communities into the art market?
I mentioned at the beginning that I am an Indigenous person. Indigenous people are almost never seen at festivals or in art markets. We are still treated as a quota. So I kept asking myself what my responsibility was within this market, knowing the rules of the space. How could I occupy this space? I could either capitalize on it for myself or somehow open the doors for an entire community.
And it was truly a huge challenge, because one of my hypotheses is that the concept of the decolonial — which is very fashionable in every space I go to and in everything I hear, not only from artists but also from institutions and people who occupy positions of power — often exists only at the level of discourse.
For many reasons, it seems very difficult to put it into practice. Worse still, we do not even ask ourselves why that is. We think that imagining a decolonial space or a decolonial artwork simply means naming the concept. But no, it really means much more than that. It means examining how we research, what strategies we generate as thinkers and researchers so that this thinking does not remain only thought, but actually becomes practice.
One of the greatest achievements of this project – at least according to my thinking – was creating work opportunities for these communities. First, because Indigenous communities around the world are often made up of people living in irregular legal situations. Many migrants are as well. If we broaden the lens to diasporas, many people are outside the systems that regulate citizenship or legal documentation. It goes without saying then, what happens when an institution or artist wants to work with a community considered a minority, or part of the global majority, and does not even know how to pay them. There is an economic problem that remains unresolved in this interaction and is not even part of the conversation.
Because, of course, we want to work with Indigenous artists, Black artists, migrant artists, different diasporas, and so on. But the first difficulty is that we do not know how to pay them. So people say: “But you need to invoice me.” And the response is: “but I do not have papers. What am I supposed to do?” “Well, then I’ll find someone else who does.”
Tell me if that doesn’t construct a center and a periphery.
Things as basic as this are still unresolved and are not even part of the conversation. It almost seems taboo to talk about capital in a market where everything revolves around capital.
So the great challenge for us with this project was this: yes, Tiziano can come, the fashionable artist of the moment, but he comes along with an entire community that has to be hired. How do we do that?
I traveled a great deal with this project, but there were also many difficulties in developing it. In Switzerland, for example, aside from the complications around how to pay the community, many people wanted to participate but could not because they were undocumented. They were afraid that appearing in an international festival could expose them and create a real risk of deportation.
What we did was find ways to support those communities who wanted to participate in the performance. We worked with lawyers to help accelerate their legalization processes, because we also discovered something absurd: through the exchange of Swiss money, the institutions involved were effectively legitimizing a person’s status, and for the two hours of the performance, they were temporarily no longer treated as “illegal”.
In 2024, I was invited by the Avignon Festival to work with a Roma community. I accepted, but I also asked to work with Latin American migrant communities, who are my own. It was a huge challenge because, well, how do you work with two communities that at first glance might seem completely opposed, with radically different worldviews? Or at least that is the assumption people make, right? That these communities are very different and cannot work together.
So we worked with both.
I do not know if you know Avignon. For those who do not, it is a very small walled city. Many of those communities had never crossed the wall into the city itself. Look already at where public and private space begins and ends: a simple wall. No one believes in walls anymore, but walls still exist, even if the physical wall has disappeared or been opened. There is a social wall in place that determines which bodies are allowed to move through certain spaces.
The Avignon Festival is now approaching eighty editions. When I attended it was the seventy-sixth edition, and those communities had never attended a festival performance. Many did not even know the festival existed. I am sure that everyone here, or ninety-nine percent of people here, knows what the Avignon Festival is, precisely because we belong to the art world, because we are in the center. And the question reappears: what are we building when we occupy these places that I consider places of privilege?
For the first time, those people were not only part of the program, but were also able to watch almost every performance. Tell me if that does not already create change, something as simple as being able to attend a performance, something so ordinary for us. We’ll leave here, have a glass of wine or a beer on the way, and casually walk into a theater to see a show at this festival. But for many people, something that basic is still inaccessible.
So the question returns: what place do we occupy? Are we builders of centers or of peripheries? What kind of periphery serves the art center we are immersed in? Are these questions present in the spaces of debate we attend? I do not know. At least today they are.
I wanted to bring you this reflection on how to generate critical thinking, real critical thinking. Not simply patting ourselves on the back and saying: “how brilliant are we for making these artworks”. Outside, people are living another reality, and that is what working with public space means. Sorry to repeat myself, but the question keeps returning: what place do we occupy? Where are we situated?
Each of you can take a brief moment to ask yourselves which side of the street you stand on, whether you are researchers, artists, or directors of institutions. What do we do with these places of privilege? Because they are privileges. I occupy a place of privilege. I come from an Indigenous community that people are still trying to erase, even today. I am the one percent of my community that gets access to these spaces, and I am not talking about a meritocracy.
The fact that I am here does not mean: “how wonderful for Tiziano, how hard he worked, how he transcended the mountains, boarded all those planes, how fantastic he is.” No. The fact that I am here speaks to the inequalities that still exist today, especially in the field of art.
That is the reflection I wanted to bring you today:
What does it mean to think critically about art and space? What are these spaces? And above all, from what position do we think about art, and for whom are we working?
Tiziano Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist whose work fundamentally integrates visual and theatrical language, performance, and artistic interventions in public space. Tiziano has been a fellow of the National Arts Fund and the National Theatre Institute of Argentina (INT-ARG). He was the winner of the 2019 Young Art Biennial, the ANTI Prize in Finland in 2023, and in 2024 received the “ZKB Audience Prize 2024” at Zürcher Theater Spektakel in Switzerland. He is the founder of the cultural management platform ULMUS, dedicated to mediating between different cultural organizations in Argentina and neighboring countries. He has worked as a content producer at the Recoleta Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. His work has been presented in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, France, Canada, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Italy, Poland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.