also scheduled
at 21:00

as part of the Fabbrica Europa 2025 festival / “Attraverso Sant’Orsola” project
in collaboration with Museo Sant’Orsola Firenze

Estudio para una extracción (Study for an Extraction) is a dance solo by choreographer and dancer Poliana Lima, based on her previous work Oro Negro.
The piece unfolds as a moving portrait, sensitively revealing the dimensions of the invisible, the fantastic, and the dreamlike that inhabit a body, a transmuted body expanding toward a new reality.

The performance is built around the metaphor of excavation, seen as the unveiling of the multiple layers that make up a body that becomes both the tool that digs and the object being unearthed, revealing all that has been demonized by the hegemonic gaze: soft, vulnerable, and perishable flesh; eroticism from a woman’s perspective; and popular culture.

Estudio para una extracción conceives the body as a territory of living memory, a space where biographical, familial, and communal dimensions intersect and are made visible, alongside the socio-cultural, spiritual, and mythical. This understanding of the body allows for an exploration of the traces left by tacit processes of transmitting habits, customs, violence, pain, and pleasure across generations.

Poliana Lima is a Brazilian-born choreographer, dancer, and teacher based in Madrid. At the core of her artistic research lies the exploration of how to create a poetic stage language capable of connecting with audiences in a direct and profound way. Her work often revolves around themes of identity and memory, as well as the interplay between artistic creation and pedagogy, which she sees as a fundamental part of her practice.
In 2020, she premiered Las cosas se mueven pero no dicen nada at Teatros del Canal (Madrid), a co-production with Festival Días da Dança/Teatro Rivoli (Porto) and the Centre National de la Danse (Paris). The piece was selected the following year by the prestigious European platform Aerowaves.
In 2022, she premiered Oro Negro at the Festival de Otoño and Cruce at Conde Duque, both in Madrid. That same year, she created the site-specific work Cosas en la distancia at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque.
In 2024, she presented The Common Ground (Conde Duque, Madrid), the second chapter of her trilogy dedicated to memory and identity, which began with Oro Negro and will conclude with Carnaval in 2027.

concept, choreography, and performance: Poliana Lima

Attraverso Sant’Orsola is an invitation to stay within the process, to experience the museum as a living space, a site of meaning-making and connection.
An evening of dance and performance, listening and imagination, that reactivates a lived architecture, revealing the generative potential of contemporary art as a tool for care, belonging, and transformation.
The invited artists — Teodora Grano, Poliana Lima, Blanca Lo Verde, Lupa Maimone — inhabit the space of Sant’Orsola, which hosts the group exhibition The Rose That Grew From Concrete, with performances that weave together body, voice, and memory in dialogue with time and the evolving architecture.

photo (detail): Talpico (@talpico)