celia stroom
BIOGRAPHY
Celia Stroom is a multidisciplinary person in the full swing, a researcher, a writer, an art producer, a singer, a dancer, an textile artisan. She focuses on designing dreamlike spaces: on stage, in museums, in people's flats, on digital devices to stimulate on a profound level human emotions, through immersive websites, surrealist performances, sensual poetry, and labyrinthine exhibitions, intimate choreographies.
- 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
> . PORTFOLIO
> . ARTIST'S STATEMENT - LAST SOLO SHOW - GRAZ 2023
> . CURATOR'S STATEMENT - LAST BIENNALE - BANGKOK 2021
PERFORMING ARTS | She first studied dance opera singing, and polyphonic music. She has been working for the last decade as a classical singer, a vocalist performer and a vocal coach for dancers, actors and visual artists. She also studied folk songs worldwide, attracted by discovering other scales and vocal techniques. She travelled the last 3 years in Georgia, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Moldavia and India, where she has been 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 La Tempete | The Tempest where she started her exploration of what she calls "moving voices”. By writing simple choreographies 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
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.
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. > VIMEO CHANNEL
PRODUCTION & CURATION | In search of expanding her exploration of multidisciplinary shows and taking womxn & ecology as its centre, she launched in Berlin in 2019 the collective studio of research, creation & production Heroines' Wave. She is curating every year a festival of performances for womxn in countries where they are rarely paid for their artistic commitments. The Enclosed Garden is enhancing hand made creations with natural materials. The project has happened in Georgia, Thailand, and now in Kyrgyzstan. She also launched the podcast program on intimate stories of the queer community, The Weave, in 2022. > HEROINESWAVE
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.
ESSAY < JARDIN CLOS > Video poetry > created during a Residency for writers at Montalembert Foundation, Rhodes, 2022.
Titre 1
TIMELINE
1983 - 2001 From Embryo to Semi Adult - Paris
2002 - 2017 Multidisciplinary studies + Transdisciplinary career - Paris - Berlin - Bruxelles
2018 - 2021 Explorer / Hypersensitivity / Hypercreativity - Georgia, Mexico, India, Moldavia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan
2022 - 2023 Inner calm - Currently writing / designing a multimedia essay about her 4 years of nomadism. Based in Berlin & Athens.
Here are the list of projects released from 2017.
Discover photos, videos, texts
2017 | GEORGIA
fieldwork on polyphonies from different regions
TIMELINE
<<January 2018. My life twisted radically. I chose to start new scenarios. I took the road, not knowing what would come next. Alongside the journey, I naturally started to write a diary as I felt isolated. It became eventually an essay where the history of literature, ethnography, and poetry are woven into a coherent whole that revolves around the concept of catharsis. In parallel, empowered by strong women met on my way, I founded Heroines'Wave, a collective studio of creation & research that aims to develop new formats of residency programs, exhibitions and performances for women artists to strengthen international collaboration and understanding among cultures. After 4 years of fieldwork worldwide and production of art projects, I am now founding in the multicultural Athens, a residence for artists working at the intersection of ethnography and botanic with multimedia arts and performance arts.>>
PROJECTS | The last years have been dedicated to the birth of 3 GARDENS
> The Enclosed Garden > A nomadic festival by women more info+
> Jardin Clos > essay, poetry on Depression depicted in the history of literature
> Taming the Garden > A film by Salomé Jashi for which Celia created the music and followed the whole process of creation (my daily reportage about the film +)
This website is a personal artwork, by © celia stroom 2022